A Great Video Night Under A Full Moon

[Skylook123]

Last night the Pima County Parks and Recreation Department decided to have their latest periodic night under the stars as a night under a full moon.  Well, I intended to show off the moon for a while in the Mallincam Junior, then switch over to M13 for what I knew would be a pretty small crowd.  Bottom line, we could do so much teaching with the full moon, never got off it.  I used it to collimate the Telrad at the start, never left it.  My partner for the evening Byron was using his refractor on other objects for eyepiece viewing, but the excitement of the gorgeous views on the monitor was, frankly, astounding. 

I had a poster set I'd made up earlier with Lunar information, like how phases come about, names of key objects in view, explanation of a lunar eclipse (moon rise was over a low ridge, just late enough in Tucson to miss the entire penumbral eclipse), and features like Lunar Poodle, Lady in the Moon, and Lunar Rabbit.  Setup was a 10" Meade SCT at f/6.3 plus an Antares 0.5X reducer on the Junior, and a Celestron lunar filter in the chain as well.  Even so, I had to set the ALC to 1/10000.  But the contrast in details was awesome.  The image size was surprising, since I could only get about 1/3 of the moon onto the 13.3" monitor at the time and which, by the way, I had to turn the brightness down to about 10 to get the final contrast improvement.  But the image was better than any book picture!  So, for about an hour and a half, the gorgeous moon and CLEAR features (Lady in the Moon was quite striking, although my wife thinks it's more like Elvis).  We talked about everything lunar, solar system development, Late Heavy Bombardment and early crater formation, the overlay of Tycho's rays on top of other features, libration, the difference in texture of the Earth-facing side vs. the "back" side due to the Earth's gravity pulling the early molten core closer to the Earth side, the change in the length of the Earth's day and distance to the moon over the last 3 billion years, religious meanings in the lunar cycles in some cultures and more.  Quite an exciting night with about 50 or so visitors, and Byron was doing a great job with his setup on the rest of the cosmos.

Good Old Mallincam Junior did GREAT.  Have another solar and lunar show and tell this afternoon and evening for our club's Family Observing group for four to eight year olds, and tomorrow night for university astronomy students.  Usually I'd be hauling out the 18" dob for showing eye candy, but the moon is sure a welcome change of pace.

[Joves]

Great report, Jim.

It often astounds me that we wish the moon away for darker skies, when there are countless hours you can spend just on this one beautiful object alone!

Glad to hear you're loving your Mallincam Jr. They look to be a brilliant bit if kit!

Aaron

[Skylook123]

Thanks, Aaron.  The Junior is good for my purposes, but tomorrow I should receive the MC Junior PRO, which is a big leap in capability for only a bit more cost.

http://mallincam.tripod.com/id61.html

[Joves]

Silly me, I was actually thinking of the Jr Pro when I replied to your report. Still, the Jr is a pretty nifty little camera.

Great move upgrading to the Jr Pro, though. I've seen results on Night Skies Network with one that quite convincingly seemed to stand up to my Mallincam Xtreme 2. I'm sure you're going to absolutely adore it!

On a side note, I can't believe the Jr Pro can be bought for the same amount of money I paid for my Orion Starshoot Deep Space Video Camera 2... The two can't even be compared!

I hope it arrives as expected and look forward to another report!!

Clear skies, Jim.

[Skylook123]

Well,  I received the Jr. PRO.  And of course, the clouds to match. 

Sigh...