Wednesday 6 August 2014

The Moon and Saturn

The night after I took the photo of the Milky Way, I photographed Saturn and the first quarter Moon through Tommy's home-made Newtonian telescope.

That night the Moon and Saturn were in different parts of the sky (here is a hi-res photo of the Moon on its own). For a sense of (apparent) scale, I used image-editing software to merge two photos taken at the same magnification, thus bringing the Moon and Saturn together in a single frame. The result is similar to what you might see during an occultation.


In the photo you can see some of the craters, mountains and "seas" of the Moon, which are cool enough in their own right. But of all the objects that can be seen in the night sky with an amateur telescope, there are few, if any, which are cooler than the rings of Saturn.

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