Last Night's Moon - 16th Feb 24

Roy Foreman · February 17

Last night a brief window of clear sky caught me off guard. No time to set up my usual lunar imaging gear, so I just used the scope that was already mounted and ready to go - a Skywatcher MN 190 Mak-Newt.

This is an excellent scope and I had no doubt that it would produce sharp and contrasty images, which it did. However it's relatively short focal length meant that selective enlargements from the main image were never going to show the fine details captured with longer focal length instruments, which turned out to be the case. After grabbing a few prime focus images the clouds rolled in, so I never got the opportunity to add amplifying lenses to extend the focal length. Oh well, next time !

Camera was a ZWO 183MM with proplanet 642 IR filter.

15% of 2000 frames - 2 pane mosaic.

Selective enlargements from the main image.

Interestingly the stacked images required no further processing, other than a bit of sharpening for web display.

Hope you enjoy, and thanks for looking.