Colors Of The Moon

Very happy, got a break in the clouds and was able to snap some images of the Moon a couple nights ago! It has been cloudy, cold and snowy here what seems like forever so when I got the opportunity, carried my big A_ _ ( hint, not arm) scope up the stairs and outside the front door to snap some quick pics before the clouds come back, which they did after about an hour. It was cold out, about -10c but that's good, less turbulence in the air, on my Moon shots there is more detail, the ray system of both Tycho and Copernicus really stand out.

I put my camera on the highest quality setting to squeeze as many pixels as possible out of it to see if I could draw out the colors of the Moon by saturating it in photo shop. The image below was the result. My best attempt to date. The blues/greens such as the Sea Of Tranquility, (the blue color sea top center of the Moon), represent Lunar basalts high in metals such as titanium, thorium and iron; the rust colors are metal poor basalts like the Sea Of Serenity , just to the west of the Sea of Tranquility and one of the eyes of the famous face on the Moon; the white colors represent the continental highlands platform ejecta, consisting of anorthosites containing some aluminum and finally the bright white areas are recent impact ejecta.

Notice Tycho crater, the bright white crater bottom right of the Moon with the extensive ray system, scientists believe that the impactor which hit the Moon and created Tycho was the result of a collision between 2 asteroids in the main asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars and they also believe that same collision created another impactor which in turn hit the Earth 65 million years ago and caused the mass extinction of the dinosaur. Well right about now you're probably wondering as I am how you got from a guy taking a picture of the Moon in his front yard to the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, don't ask, couldn't tell you, I do this on the fly a lot of times, hope you find it interesting.

I was reading an article the other day about how odd our Moon is, odd in the sense that our Moon was probably created by our Earth colliding with a Mars size planet about 4.5 billion years ago, the rocks and dust that were blasted from the collision formed the Moon. Scientists are saying this only happens 5-10% of the time. Planetary systems are usually formed side by side or planets acquire their moons by gravity.

Moon Rise In High Definition

The Japanese Moon Probe Kaguya has sent back stunning images of an Earth rise, the above picture and Earth set the below picture. Notice below in the Earth setting picture the Earth appears upside down, visible is Australia and Asia. The images were taken 62 miles above the Lunar surface. Bonus for us Canadians, the Discovery Channel HD in partnership with Japanese broadcaster NHK will be showing Return To The Moon which is about the probes mission to the Moon and will show the most current images. This program will be repeated throughout the coming weeks starting November 14/07. I will be PVRing mine this afternoon while I'm at work, very cool.

The Shuttle Atlantis made it's 7 hour 3 mile journey to it's launch pad in preparation for the December 6th. launch. This will be the 24th shuttle mission to the ISS. Atlantis's main mission will be to install the European Space Agency's Columbus module which will be dedicated to long term space research.

The Google AdSense ads have been working out great for me! So far I've purchased a 9.95 Earth rise Hi Res print, and 2,000 satellite TV stations for my laptop for only 50 bucks. the one ad said "Shocking discovery they don't want you to know", well who doesn't want to know what they don't want you to know? So now I have 2,000 satellite TV stations on my PC AND I now know what they didn't want me to know, check and mate, sometimes my own intelligence amazes even me.

I will leave you with a video I put together on Lunar travel using my Tycho perspective image, duplicated over and over again with the perspective changed a little each frame to give the illusion of moving over the Lunar surface.

Comet Holmes' Tail

Hot off the presses, my latest image of Comet Holmes taken last night. It is composed of 80 images at 10 secs for each image and the best stacked together. I then processed it in photo shop using the shadow/highlight feature to remove the whites of the dust particles to get underneath the exterior dust to see what was going on with the nucleus, I then increased the levels of the other colors to get a false color image showing the highly magnified nucleus releasing particles to feed it's ever expanding tail, isn't that just too cool! I put the before and after photoshopped images into a little clip above and entitled it, that's right "Comet Holmes Tail".

Comet Holmes is moving away from us now, and is also moving in the sky as well. Last night it appeared much closer as in the above image to the star Mirfak, and the comet will in the next few months make a semi-circle around the constellation Perseus. The best time for viewing is right now while there is a nearly new moon and the comet is still in it's bright phase, who knows how long it will last.

I signed up with Google AdSence, certainly not for the money but to provide a service for my guests. I was leery about the type of advertising they would supply for me, but the very first ad change my mind on that. It was an ad to purchase the newly released Apollo Hi-Res scans of the original Hassleblad lunar 70mm camera images, and get this you can get them in sizes of up to 3x4 feet! The images that have been scanned to date so far are kept at Arizona State University

Also on the site where you can purchase the framed prints is a Trailer for David Sington's directed documentary "In The Shadow Of The Moon". I definitely want to see this movie but it probably won't be released here in Saskatoon, have to wait for the DVD release February 12th. 2008. The film is a documentary about the astronauts who circled or landed on the Moon between 1968 and 1972. One astronaut said as he was standing on the Lunar surface looking back at Earth "I felt that I was literally standing on God's front porch" I am going to leave you with another one of my flying over Tycho perspective images. Tycho is the crater top center of the image with a Central peak.

A Matter Of Perspective

Imagine with me if you will, you are orbiting the Moon in spaceship Boba at about 150 miles distant from the Lunar surface traveling 2,000 mph on your way to Tycho City (Tycho is the crater at the top of the image with a central peak), and you look out your window and snap an image, the above image is what you'd see, no it's not taken by a lunar probe or any of the Apollo missions, it is one of my highly magnified lunar images, I figured out how to change the perspective of an image in photo shop so that it looks like your flying over the Lunar landscape as opposed to looking at it through a telescope. I was going through some of the images taken by lunar probes and the Apollo missions in Virtual Moon Atlas and thought it would be cool if I could get the same effect on some of my images, so after many hours of fooling around with the free transform edit tool in photo shop I was able to come up with a totally different viewpoint hence the above image. You may ask why would I spend all that time doing that, I ask why not, it looks cool, takes me away even further then I already am from our Earthly constraints to a place where you can imagine the impossible, besides a had a few hours to kill the other night.

The Shuttle Discovery arrived home safely yesterday at 1:01 pm. EST. after a successful and complex mission. This is space exploration at its finest, from the ability and ingenuity of being able to develop things like cufflinks to repair one of the International Space Station's solar arrays to preparing the Space Station for further space exploration with the installation of the Harmony module, this is why I blog so much about the Shuttle program, these people are making things happen up there so we can reach for the Moon and beyond, they are our modern day Columbuses!

Okay this is just too cool. Japan's Lunar orbiter Kaguya has just sent back high definition Images of the moon along with a HD Movie. The movie has 2 sequences, one of the Lunar polar area as in the above image, and another sequence of the Oceanus Procellarum region. The images were shot about 100km from the Lunar surface, how exciting is this?!

NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center's Fabrication Plant released a picture of a mock up of the Orion crew module. It is America's first new manned spacecraft since the shuttle was developed 30 years ago. The Orion is part of the Constellation Program which will return us to the Moon by 2020.

Half Moon

Got a real cool shot of the Moon last night in its half Moon stage, the clouds were just right and gave a haunting mysterious look to the Moon, which is what the Moon is , haunting and mysterious. Interestingly enough the Moon had no color to it , couldn't saturate it at all, probably because of the fact there has been no solar activity lately. I marked off on the image below where Apollo 11 landed at the Mare Tranquillitatis or as we know it, The Sea Of Tranquility. July 20, 1969, Niel Armstrong was the first man to set foot onto the Lunar surface, below it is marked as a black circle on one of the images I took last night.



The Mars Society is now taking applications for mock Mars missions at their Mars Desert Research Station. Applications will be accepted from healthy people between the ages of 18-60, must be understood there will be hard work, no pay but eternal glory, all applicants must be willing to sign a liability waiver. The Mars Society has 4 mock Mars habitats, one in the Canadian Arctic, their Desert Research Station, one in the Australian outback and one in Iceland. They state, "In these Mars like environments, we will launch a program of extensive long duration geology and biology field exploration operations, conducted in the same style and under many of the same constraints as they would on the red planet. By doing so we will start the process of learning how to explore Mars". The Mars Society has many big sponsors including NASA. If I had the time and money I would so be there, want some of that eternal glory.



Tycho Crater is my latest feature saturated color Lunar image, again lots of red, I'm running out of images that have any color in them, it was cool while it lasted. I've mentioned this fact before but I'll say it again cause it's cool. One of Tycho's rays intersected the Apollo 17's landing site over 2,000 kms away, the crew gathered a sample of the ejecta and the age of Tycho was determined by that sample, 108 million years old. Tycho is the large crater just left of center with a central peak.

You aliens can run but you can't hide! The Allen Radio Telescope is now online and has started gathering data last week with it's 42 radio dishes. The array will eventually have 350 dishes and in the next couple decades will gather 1,000 times as much data as was gathered by SETI in the last 45 years. Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft contributed 25 million dollars, another group of investors has contributed 25 million dollars and UC Berkeley and SETI are fund raising additional funds to complete the project. They estimate completion with all 350 dishes in place in just 3 years. Below is a YouTube video of the array in action.

Harvest Moon

I took the above picture around 10:30pm September 26th. I was hoping to get a shot of the Moon as it rose from the horizon to get more of a yellow tinge to it, but unfortunately it had just finished raining, but I did get a real nice rainbow shot.

Never fear, I did get a good shot of the 98% Harvest Moon the night before as it was low on the horizon, has got a nice yellow tint to it. The pictures below illustrate the effect the atmosphere has on the color of the Moon. The top one was taken at 7:00pm, the one below it was taken at 7:24pm, the higher the moon is the less atmosphere it's light travels through, therefore less tint caused by the Earth's atmosphere. The picture below is one of my favorite pictures of the Moon I've ever taken. Since it was still a little light out when I took it, you can see the blue sky contrasting against the wall of the telescope, looks as if your looking through the window of the Lunar Crew Exploration Vehicle as your approaching the moon.

The Harvest Moon is the full moon closest to the autumn equinox, in the northern hemisphere, this year it happens to be September 26th. Called a Harvest Moon because it rises as the Sun sets giving the farmers much needed light as they work long into the night to get their crop off, back in the olden days farmers never had lights on their tractors so the harvest moon was a welcome sight indeed. Anna over at My Only Photo took some great pictures as well check them out.

Tycho Crater , top left side of the Moon in the above picture, the major crater with the vast ray system, some reaching as far as 2000 kms, I've mentioned this crater a couple times before, what can I say it's my favorite. Tycho was in 2001: A Space Odyssey the book and the film, Tycho was a location for one of the monoliths, also in the film Star Trek First Contact, Tycho was the location of Tycho City.

To give you an example of how much the full moon lights up the night sky, I was up at 3:30am Wednesday morning to do some astronomy, it was going to be a warm night , by warm I mean 10 degrees C so I thought I'd take advantage of the last warm nights before winter and do some stargazing. I get outside and the moon is directly overhead casting it's blue gray glow over everything. My pod was actually glowing a blueish color, spooky yet beautiful. This strange moonlight is what our eye night sensitive rods pick up, which are 1,000 times more sensitive than our eye cones which are used for day viewing, but the rods are colorblind and are more sensitive to the blues more so then the reds. In astronomy we use averted vision, when we can't see something directly, we look off to the side of where we think the target should be and let our rods find the target, works all the time. The strange moonlight article has some cool sayings, "Moonlight steals color from whatever it touches" or "it's a bit like seeing the world through an old black and white TV set". Needless to say it was too bright that morning for viewing galaxies or nebulae, but the globular and open star clusters were magnificent as usual.

A Press Release issued last Thursday by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory stating a team of 5 astronomers has found a "mysterious" pulse from outer space, about 3 billion light years distant. It was a one time pulse lasting under 5 milliseconds. To date no other pulse or signal has the same characteristics as this one and as they put it "represents an entirely new astronomical phenomenon". The team had gone through approximately 500 hours of archival data recordings by Parkes Radio Telescope of Apollo 11 fame. Scientists are not sure exactly what they have found, could be anything from superdense neutron stars colliding to evaporating black holes. Right now no one knows or has seen anything like it, that's why it is so exciting.

Lunar Craters

I love Lunar craters, went out last weekend got my high power scope setup and took a couple of images of my 2 favorite craters.

So you're in your brand new Ares I crew module, you look out the window, you see the above Lunar landscape, you are about 120 miles above the Lunar surface and are slowing down to enter Lunar orbit at around 60 miles high. When ever I'm looking at the Moon through my telescope I daydream the above scenario, makes it a lot more interesting and fun.

The 3 billion year old crater Plato is the darkest and one of the most mysterious craters on the Moon. In the picture above it is the dark crater lower right of center. Plato is situated between 2 mountain ranges, the Montes Alpes, the mountain range on top of Plato in the pic above, and Montes Teneriffe, the mountain range just below Plato in the pic above. The mysterious part of Plato is that it has one of the highest occurrence rates for all kinds of Transient Lunar Phenomenon ranging from gaseous anomalies to bright flashing lights.

The relatively young crater Tycho at only 108 million years old is pictured below, just off center with a central rock formation peak. Tycho is noted for its impressive ray system, some as long as 2,000 kilometers. Actually one such ray intersected Apollo 17's landing site, 2,000 kilometers from Tycho, the Astronauts gathered some of the ejecta and that's how they determined Tycho's age, cool.