Tuesday, May 06, 2008

The moon by Earthlight


There's about a metric buttload of stuff I want to blog about, including the highlights of the Lick Observatory trip (now on my Flickr page) and some awesome predator/prey photos that one of my students took and the Western Pond Turtle that my wife caught crawling across our driveway last week, but it's the time of year when I've got finals to write and grade so all that stuff will have to wait.

In the meantime, this is what the moon looked like tonight. This fetching display is called "the old moon in the new moon's arms"; from the moon the Earth is nearly full and it bounces back enough light to dimly illuminate the shadowed regions of the moon. If you'd like to see it for yourself, you don't have to wait a month--the show should be almost as good for the next couple of nights.

For those who care, this was a two-second exposure with my Nikon Coolpix 4500, shooting through an Orion XT6 Dobsonian reflector with a 32mm Plossl eyepiece.

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2 Comments:

Blogger TheBrummell said...

Any advice on getting a couple of seconds exposure through 1/2 a pair of binoculars with a Nikon coolpix 5200?

I've taken literally thousands of shots through one of the eyepieces of a dissection microscope, but never long exposures, and I haven't tried strapping the binos to a tripod or anything, yet.

Pictures like this are great. Please keep posting such things.

4:41 PM  
Blogger Dr. Vector said...

Stay tuned. That is such a great question that I'm going to answer it in a separate post.

Pictures like this are great. Please keep posting such things.

Thanks, sincerely. Glad to know it's of interest.

8:20 AM  

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