Top tip for identifying moon shots

[BrendanC]

Hi all,

I've taken shots of the moon before with my bargain-basement Bresser Mikrokular camera, but just invested in a T7C camera - a cheapo version of the ZWO ASI120MC. This is mainly for guiding when shooting DSOs, but I got the colour version so I had the added flexibility of taking lunar and planetary images if I fancied it.

I got it working last night, took a bit of wrestling but I finally managed to get a shot of the moon - 5000 frames captured in SharpCap Pro and stacked and processed in Registax. Nothing too fancy but a good start.

However, now I'm all over plate solving from my DSO work, it did occur to me: which bit of the moon did I actually capture? Can you plate solve the moon?

Turns out you can't. The most common advice is to download an atlas and look for it. But, given that I'm very lazy, I found a workaround: use Google's Image Search.

So, on uploading my image to https://www.google.com/imghp, I get absolutely loads of results back telling me it's the Sinus Iridum plain: https://www.google.com/search?tbs=sbi:AMhZZisatfdoUDCjbhsh01nAM7fUZp_1y9b6gJiNTpRmsCAVJJtVGCCQ732121AuSY0D8OAB3LLJlE48sZSDneQ9c4QzL-MR5At6S9Nd9jfKPUn8JdW1zTMWcX4CdA5f-gZtD9u6aP9HMqJx1waq9BrKEyXjKSpNFRzxxEJ88xCqPJs9hTKzUdA0du_1xZ4WLatZkt7toR2X_1tBeV38zrtKYI6NBIgT-ASQBJJv4ztTcVwRx030BYuaS46BLGDJvGp1fQmMj2Dqnqan5wTH1X8yBIW-sPML6-YFyYgpIUXTW22gKZOkbY6ed5RUPmMJTqQPnYkJ-bXDDAw6nMHG-WrEtak9JX8W-Gcpw&hl=en-GB

Sorted! Or, should I say, solved!

This may be old hat around these parts but I thought I'd pass it on as a neat trick. You can't solve the moon, but you can ask Google to do the next best thing.

Edited October 10, 2020 by BrendanC

[Stargazer33]

Nice tip. A good one for new people to learn the Moon's features. 

[Altocumulus]

Google Image back-search is an amazing tool - used it lots of times, though not on the Moon!

[BrendanC]

I know, same here - never used it with a moon shot but tried it, without really thinking it would work, and it did!

I even tried submitting it to Astrometry.net just to see what happened, and as expected, it failed.