Another spectacular moonrise this evening. The November Full Moon is referred to as the Beaver’s Full Moon. Here, we see the moon rising above the ’scrub oak’ on a ridge east of Park City, Utah.  This shot was taken using the Canon Rebel XTi for a 1/30 second exposure at ISO400 shooting at prime focus through the Astro Physics Starfire Refractor. I picked this image because it had the best foreground display. I processed it in GIMP and did a Curves function on it. I pushed the low end up and the midrange down. This brought out the foreground (earthly objects) and dimmed the moon. The moon was previously a bit washed out. Pulling the midrange down a bit brought the moon under control and revealed a bunch of surface detail.

1. Charisse, November 27, 2007:

   I heard Mars is in its closes orbit to the Earth. Where are those pics, Anthony??

2. anthony, November 27, 2007:

   Hey Charisse

   Mars is going to have a close pass of Earth shortly. It’s not the mythical “closest approach” that gets re-circulated via email every year or so. That said, anytime Mars passes close to Earth some spectacular views can be had. Mars has recently doubled in brightness over the last month or so. I’ll double again over the next month or two. Mars has only recently gotten to the size that significant surface details can be seen. It’s currently 15 arc seconds in angular size. Below 10″, no details are visible. I’d expect that it will grow by another 50% in the coming weeks. Mars usually peaks at around 22-24″ range. So, the best part of the show lies ahead of us. Mars is now rising around 8pm. This makes it a good target for observation before midnight (even astronomers need to sleep). As I’ve never been much of a planetary imager (not for lack of trying), I’ve been putting off imaging Mars until it got a bit larger (and hence easier).
   Anyway… Thanks for checking in!

   Anthony