Lunar Tour

Just one more post from our trip to Geology Vista last Saturday. Even though we were only there for a couple hours (set up in snow and very treacherous ice), we accomplished 3 mini-projects. Besides the objective prism shot of the Hyades and the closeup of Achenar (last 2 posts), we also took advantage of a very pretty lunar crescent and Melinda's camera's HD video capability and took a short movie tour of the moon.

Like the sunset clip we took a couple weeks ago, we again put this one on Youtube. This lunar tour video is just over 1.5 minutes long, and gives a nice detailed view of the crescent and craters.

The effects of atmospheric seeing can be noticed, but it isn't too objectionable at this scale, taken with the Celestron 14". The effective focal length is about 4 meters, so consider the scope a telephoto lens of about 4,000mm focal length. Melinda's camera is the Canon T1i, which is one of the first allowing HD video. We grabbed 3 frames from the clip and pieced together the following mosaic. If we were more ambitious, we'd annotate it to label some of the features, but we can't do it all for you! If enough of you complain in the comments, we'll add some... And yes, we noticed after the fact that we missed the southern cusp!

BE SURE TO CLICK ON THE MOON VIDEO ABOVE! Enjoy!