The Moon in Infrared

[Bugdozer]

Here's a shot of the Moon taken early this morning using my IR modified Nikon D70. This was the first time I had tried with this camera - it's tricky because there is no live view to zoom in on and you can't even magnify the pictures properly on the tiny back screen to check sharpness. I had to go by eye and cross my fingers!

This is a single shot but when I have more time I plan to stack the several that I took to improve the image. The bandpass in this camera is 690nm and above. The main difference to visible light is that there's a little more inherent contrast between the darker and brighter features on the surface. One bit where this is very apparent is the dark floored craters around Mare Australe, which has quite a favourable libration here (I compared this with another photo taken at the same phase in August, you can't see those craters at all in that one!) The downside is that the inherent image quality of the D70 is nowhere near as good as newer DSLRs.