Hercules, Atlas and more, during the Waning Gibbous


I was having a bit of fun browsing along the terminator line early in the morning with a Takahashi Mewlon 210 and enjoying the calm and warming weather. My favorite view of the night is of the Hercules and Atlas craters. You'll see the difference in how these craters look, vs the craters of Aristoteles and Eudoxus, which are not as dynamically showcased due to not as dramatic lighting conditions near the terminator line.

The Hercules and Atlas craters are 30km apart. Atlas is 2km deep, and about 3.2 billion years old. Hercules G is a smaller crater inside the floor of the Hercules, which is between 1.1 and 3.2 billion years old. If you look closely you can also see Atlas E, which is a 58km ghost crater, or a crater that was there before Atlas even. Enjoy the other shots as well, including Aristoteles and Eudoxus. I'll do crater verification via Virtual Moon Atlas which I'll run when I process images or browse with an eyepiece, to confirm all of the many craters. I wasn't using an ADC and the seeing was poor unfortunately with wobbly tennis ball views and some high cloud or fog, seen especially when going into barlow mode, but temps weren't freezing so it was fun to just take in the view after some work on the scope.

Images were taken with a ZWO ASI462MC camera with a 2" Pro Planet IR 807 block filter, Takahashi Mewlon 210 uncorrected Dall-Kirkman telescope (2,415 mm focal length, focal ratio: f/11.5, aperture: 210 mm) with Stellarvue 2" diagonal, with and without an Orion 2x barlow in poor seeing conditions, no ADC used, just for fun mostly, enjoying first lunar light on the scope, no matter the conditions. Images were captured in .SER format with Sharpcap, then into Autostakkert! for the top 5-10%, and taken either in to a Registax 6 wavelets preset I've made for this scope, or Topaz DeNoise, then lightly stretched / balanced, etc.

Enjoy just some everyday photos of the moon here, or let me know if you're using similar equipment and have tips for acquisition. I wasn't originally intending to do lunar shoot, so imaging conditions weren't ideal, but it's good to share just a regular session now and then.

Here are Hercules and Atlas craters, with a barlow (click for a link , or via Astrobin)


Zooming out now on the region, no barlow:

Now going over to Aristoteles and Eudoxus:

Other miscellaneous views:







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