MAY 5TH - BAILLY WELL PLACED - 96.5%, 12.8 DAYS

[paulastro]

It was nice and clear last night, though the seeing was very poor throughout and the Moon always had a halo of haze around it.  There was continuous fine scintillation, though visually I could get some fine views with my binoviewer and Orthos at x225.  Bailly, the largest crater on the Moon, was well placed and to try and get a reasonable photo I had to take lots of frames at the highest speed I could manage to try and grab a moment of better seeing.  The crop of the frame below shows Bailly to the right on the terminator and still partly in shadow to the S.

Single frame below taken at 22.41 with the SW 120ED, Olympus E-M5 Mk11. 1/500 sec at 400 asa.

 

 

[mikeDnight]

Nice image of Bailly Paul. It looks like you had steadier seeing than I did as far as the Moon is concerned. 128X was the seeing limit for me around the time of your observation. I did get a great view of Venus earlier in the evening though.

[Stu]

It did look good, didn’t it Paul. Nice shots despite the poor seeing. It was similar here but still managed some fairly high mags. Schröter’s looked great again last night, you’ve caught it well.

[paulastro]

5 hours ago, mikeDnight said:

Nice image of Bailly Paul. It looks like you had steadier seeing than I did as far as the Moon is concerned. 128X was the seeing limit for me around the time of your observation. I did get a great view of Venus earlier in the evening though.

Many thanks Mike.  The pic is a bit deceptive in that it was the best in about 150+ frames I took.  Most of them were very poor.  I also do a little processing to try to improve my pics.

Visually as you know when using a binoviewer, the brain works well to make a composite of the images going to each eye which is far better than each single image.  With a single eyepiece the views were very poor 

[paulastro]

4 hours ago, Stu said:

It did look good, didn’t it Paul. Nice shots despite the poor seeing. It was similar here but still managed some fairly high mags. Schröter’s looked great again last night, you’ve caught it well.

Thanks Stu, that's very kind of you.

[Stu]

48 minutes ago, paulastro said:

With a single eyepiece the views were very poor 

I do agree with that. Last night was very noticeable switching between the Leica Zoom at x271 (quite poor) to the Binos at  somewhere over x300; the views were definitely sharper in the binoviewer with really nice detail in Schröter’s Valley at times despite the poor seeing.

[Pete Presland]

Cracking looking Moon, the seeing was a little wobbly by the time i viewed it last night.