2 - A MOMENT WITH THE MOON

04/04/20

    Last night the sky was clear and the moon was gleaming over the world, peeking out from over the roofs near my home. I rushed to set up my telescope in my backyard to experiment.

    

   

    A while back i had worked out how to use the red dot finder on my telescope, a tiny laser which projects onto the night sky to give you a rough idea of where the telescope if pointing. It reminds me of the little lasers pointers on a laser quest gun. Believe me, this was the single most helpful thing in finding the moon in the enormity of the night sky. It took me close to an hour to painstakingly make tiny adjustments to the altitude and declination of my telescope, following the trail of an increasingly white glow. 

    

    This hard work paid off when i finally caught my first glimpse of the moon through my telescope. I am sure you have seen close up pictures of the moon online or in a book but seeing the moon up close with your own eyes is breathtaking. Through the eyepiece of my telescope the waning gibbous moon just about fit and the magnification allowed me to see definition in the moons surface astonishingly well.

    I was desperate to take a photo of this with my phone but it proved particularly challenging. I have a small phone mount, which I had found on amazon, which can be used to hold your phone over the eyepiece. However, I found inserting my phone into the holder knocked the position of the telescope and caused the moon to rush out of focus which soon became unbearably frustrating. Instead, I tried taking photos and videos just by holding my phone over the eyepiece which was still relatively difficult. The big issue was getting the image to focus enough for the moon to appear as anything other than an odd-shaped white blob.

- M 

    I am disappointed to say that I was unable to obtain a picture of the moon which paid justice to what i could see with my own eyes. The best I could capture was the images below featuring small slices of the moon in which some of the details have come out. As a first attempt, I'm pretty thrilled. There will be a full moon next week, so I am hoping to try and take an even better picture then.