A Moon shot

I’m working on a longer post about my love for stargazing, but after being up to late stargazing lately, coupled with Mittens waking me up too early for his pill “treats”, today ended up being more of a slog than I’d imagined, so I thought I’d share an image from last night’s twilight viewing of Luna, taken through a refractor telescope. The purple border on the right edge of the Moon is caused by something called “chromatic aberration,” which is an artifact of the two lenses of this particular scope and its short focal length.

Still the terminator, on the lefthand edge of the lunar image here, is sharp. The terminator is the boundary between day and night on the Moon, which changes hour by hour as it moves around the Earth.

In the lower left part of the terminator is a line of craters, the largest an oval. That’s Schickard, an impact crater which looks oblong because of foreshortening.