A Great Big Thump

[Whistlin Bob]

Came back from a nice family night out on Friday to a lovely clear view of 95%ish moon- had a lovely hour taking some pictures. After doing lots of DSO lately, where the pursuit of greater quality is leading to ever longer integration times it was nice to just wander round the disc of the moon and take (relatively) quick captures.

These are my 3 favourites- the same technique was used on all three- a one minute video using ASI224 camera, then Autostakkert to identify and stack the best 5% of frames and finally Pixinsight to crop and sharpen using the Multiscale tool (similar to Wavelets in Registax) and then tweak the levels.

First one is the Copernicus crater and associated impact debris. I tweaked the curves quite a lot to bring out the spoil from the impact. From Wikipedia, the crater itself is 93km wide, using the Pixel scale I make the main disk of debris around it 400km wide, whilst Wikipedia thinks the rays extend for twice that. That’s quite an impact!!!

Next up is another impact- here’s the smaller Proclus crater, with the rays of the impact spreading out over Mare Crisium:

Finally- here’s the Aristarchus Crater with Schroter’s Valley (which is the sinuous rille extending up from Aristarchus in the middle of the image) being really nicely illuminated on its southern wall.

 

[Guest]

What telescope were you using that evening?

[MarkAR]

Superb images, looks like the Proclus impact was at a slight angle going by the debris field.

[Whistlin Bob]

7 minutes ago, merlin100 said:

What telescope were you using that evening?

Hi- it's a Skywatcher 200p Newtonian- and I had 1.6x and 2x WO barlows attached.

8 minutes ago, MarkAR said:

Superb images, looks like the Proclus impact was at a slight angle going by the debris field

Thank you! That's what I thought about the direction as well. Lovely to be able to see that.