Archive for November 20th, 2007

The Lunar Apennine Mountain Range

Posted by anthony

I took this picture almost as an after thought. I’d gone out to image Comet Holmes as it cruised by Mirfak (α Per). While doing so, I decided to image the moon to see if the two really were the same size (the actually are). I pulled the Canon Rebel off of the scope and popped in the 31mm Nagler eyepiece with a variable polarizer to reduce the brightness somewhat. Skies were actually much steadier than I’d expected, revealing some amazing details. I decided to make use of the TeleVue 2x Barlow to capture some of the added details.

I chose this view centered on the Lunar Apennine Mountains because this is one of the most dramatic features on the lunar surface. There were also a couple of distinctive craters running right along the lunar terminator that were brought into stark contrast. The lunar terminator is the line where light meets dark on the lunar surface. It is along this line that many oft missed details are revealed to lunar observers..

This shot was the best of a number taken that night. I took a handful of quick but under exposed images thinking that I might stack them. Unfortunately, minor variations caused by seeing existed that made this seem problematic. I decided that the entire process would be much easier if I took the best single image and started working from there. The accompanying image was just what I was looking for. It was a 1/30 second exposure at ISO100. It was fairly well illuminated and required just a little boost at the low end of the spectrum using the Curves feature in GIMP. GIMP is a free image processing software package that runs on a number of operating systems. I’ve used it in the past when my laptop was running Windows. Unfortunately, the laptop came with Vista, the most horrible version of Windows ever released. I suffered for about 6 months before finally deciding to load Ubuntu Linux on the machine. Its been just a short while since doing so, but performance and stability are dramatically improved.. but I digress Anyway, GIMP also runs quite well on my Linux box, allowing me to do whatever processing I need on my images.