The moon in the daytime with a 3.5m telescope.

Shooting the moon


It's raining again - not much chance of getting anything useful on the sky tonight.
I wanted to do a bit more with the frame of the moon that I took Saturday evening
(In memory of Neil Armstrong). When the first mosaic CCD cameras were built in the
mid-90s, it became common to show their field of view by imaging the moon. To
astronomers who had traded in their large photographic plates for tiny 800 X 800 CCDs,
this was a welcome advance. However, the surface brightness of the moon is higher than
the daytime sky, and so one used to have to play tricks like partially closing the mirror cover,
or occulting part of the telescope beam with the dome. This was in addition to putting in a
filter that gave you the part of the spectrum where your CCDs were least sensitive so you
could take a 1 second exposure, which was about the limit of reliability and uniformity for the shutters we used.




http://podideployment.blogspot.com/2012/08/shoot-moon.html

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