stargazing
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Happy Day of the Moon
Mondays, am I right? Turns out, not only is the start of the conventional work week*, but it’s also the day of the Moon. Literally. Monday is derived from the Old English Mōnandæg. Mōna means Moon in that language. Wikipedia states that it was a translation of the Latin “dies lunae,” day of Luna, the Latin name for Earth’s constant companion in the celestial dance. This Monday I was up early, as is my elderly cat Mittens’s wont, since he loves his “pill treats,” and wants them as soon as the sky begins to lighten. After taking care of him, I took my telescope outside for some morning Moon viewing.…
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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…