The Moon on April 3, 2025

I’m very lucky to own two beautiful Questar telescopes. One I had fully serviced by Questar in 2022, and the other is an all-original example that has never been serviced. Both were originally built in 1962.

When I want to spend some time observing in the backyard, I usually go for the recently serviced one. After all, it has a new optics set, and it performs amazingly. But tonight I decided to show a little love for the all-original 1962 Questar I have.

My main motivation was to do some old-school film lunar astrophotography with a new roll of Ilford FP4 Plus loaded into my Questar-modified Nikon F. I hope to shoot through the rest of that roll soon and get it developed and scanned.

After having made a few film exposures, I switched to my Canon EOS M200 and shot a handful of digital exposures. This is the best of the bunch:

In postproduction, I increased shadow brightness, decreased highlights, increased midtone brightness a bit, and increased contrast just a touch.

Spring is definitely my favorite time of the year to do lunar observing and imaging. The Moon in its early phases before first quarter is high in the sky, and it’s easier to get crisp views of our lunar neighbor compared to other times of the year.