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Thursday, August 30, 2007

Hello Aristarchus

After totality ended, it was fun watching the lunar surface re-emerge from the Earth's shadow, as the procession of familiar lunar features slowly moved into sunlight, it was like meeting old friends (in this case after only seeing them dimly for the last two hours in the Earth's shadow...). The bright crater Aristarchus appears at upper right shortly after emerging from the Earth's shadow. Aristarchus is an interesting site, known for producing most of the Lunar Transient Events which some think might be volcanic in origin. I suspect that they are mostly cases of the crater reflecting Earthshine back at us very efficiently, but no one really knows yet. Maybe someday when we go back, we can land a mission there to study it in detail. This image was taken at 300mm focal length with an exposure of 1/50 seconds at f/8, ISO 200.
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3 comments:

Unknown said...

Nicely done Jim! Were you on KP for the event? I decided to stay home for the eclipse as the weather looked pretty iffy. Managed to get some decent shots from that local - check 'em out!

See you on Mt. Graham in a couple weeks!

Jim said...

Thanks Dave. I was in my backyard. I loved your shots on your blog. Wish I had the lens and mount you used.

Hope the VATT has a CCD camera available then!

Tuguldur said...

Jim, what were you doing yesterday?? were you going back home? :P

In fact, are you gonna shot Aurigids tomorrow early morning? :)