The Moon on March 19, 2024

With temperatures in the low 60s on still another beautiful evening here in the Pacific Northwest, I got out with the Questar to do a bit more lunar observing and imaging.

The atmosphere was nice and steady with only minor turbulence. But the Moon is starting to get bright. Tonight was probably the last night to see a decent amount of detail around the terminator.

The highlight this evening was the lunar crater Copernicus, which has a rather conspicuous field of boulders and other interesting details to the left of the crater in this 100% crop of the above image:

This is not my sharpest image I’ve ever gotten of this region of the Moon, but it’s not bad. Where lunar imaging is concerned—at least the kind of old-fashioned single-shot imaging I do—sharpness is primarily a function not of the telescope (which is first rate in this case) or the camera but instead of how steady the seeing is.

A lot of amateur astronomers (and professional ones, too) regard the Moon as an annoying source of natural light pollution. But after doing astronomy now for just short of 10 years, lunar observing has become one of my favorite areas of the hobby.