The Moon on March 15, 2024

With the benefit of unusually warm and clear weather for this time of year, I made sure to get out with my 1962 Questar to have a look at a beautiful crescent Moon this evening.

Spring is my favorite time of year to do lunar observing. When the Moon is around first quarter, it’s high in the sky. Temperatures are usually pretty mild, too.

This evening, I tried something different. Rather than set my Canon EOS M200 to aperture priority and let the onboard light meter determine the best exposure time, I set the camera to manual mode and underexposed by one-third stop. I did this to prevent the brighter parts of the Moon from getting overexposed. When shooting raw, it’s a bit easier to recover shadow details in postprocessing than it is to darken blown out highlights.

At the eyepiece, the complex of three craters near the terminator and just below the middle (Theophilus, Cyrillus, and Catharina) were conspicuously illuminated and showed excellent detail.

My seeing wasn’t the best this evening. We had gusty winds for most of this afternoon. Although the wind calmed down by the evening, the atmosphere still appeared to be quite turbulent as I observed the Moon in the eyepiece.