4th Observing Session: Moon Redux

Noticing a clear night last night I quickly set up the telescope with the intention to photograph the Moon again, but this time with the Meade Color DSI II camera instead of my Canon SLR to see the difference in camera quality.

What you see below is the Moon in its "Waning Gibbous" phase with about 70% of the surface visible. This mosaic was made up of only 3 exposures with slight sharpening and color correction in Photoshop.

3rd Observing Session - Moon & Capella

After a short vacation and the start of fall weather, I was able to do another photography session - this time with my DSLR camera.

The moon was out in full force during this session, which was the prime candidate of the night. Due to the size of the moon (and the wrong eyepiece I was using) I had to take multiple shots of the moon to make this mosaic (the black areas are parts of the moon that I wasn't able to take for whatever reason).

Due to the moon being so bright (and washing out all of the deep space objects) I was limited to viewing stars so I turned my scope to Capella, the 11th brightest star in the sky. Looking at Capella, it looks like one bright point of light, but is actually a close binary star about 42.5 light-years away. Intense X-ray radiation emanates from Capella, most likely due to surface magnetic activity in one of the stars.