I’ll start my first post in quite some time with this sweet shot of Sunday evenings crescent moon. This was a tiny sliver of a moon, just shy of 24 hours old. It was only because of the incredibly flat horizons to the west that I was able to snag this shot. This was taken from our campsite down at Gooseberry Mesa in extreme southern Utah. Note the existence of Earthshine in the image. Earthshine is sunlight that reflects off of the Earth and illuminates the non-sunlit portions of the moon. This is why you can actually see the moon in its entirety in this image

I need to tell you just how amazing the skies were here. Except for some sky glow along the western horizon (light pollution comes from nearby St. George, Ut and more distant Las Vegas, NV), the skies were nearly pristine. In the wee hours, the Milky Way spanned from southern horizon to the northern horizon. It was an almost spiritual sight. It was also nice to see some of my old friends… the summer constellations of Hercules, Cygnus, Lyra, Sagittarius, etc.

I got several nice hours of dark sky time after the moon had set. I hit a bunch of old favorites. The Orion Nebula was sitting low in the western sky as it got dark. The galactic pair of M81 & M82 were almost directly over head. This made for some incredible views through the big scope. With its long focal length, I could just barely squeeze the two galaxies into the field of view simultaneously. Cranking up the power forced me to look at one or the other in much more detail (not exactly a bad thing).

Astro Photo Details:

* Designation: The Moon
* Magnitude: roughly mag -12
* Size: roughly 1/2*
* Phase: 23.9 hours past new

Astro Photo Processing Details

* Canon Digital Rebel XTi
* 0.3s at ISO800
* PhotoShop CS2 Curves & Levels (mac version)