Although the moon has been observed by amateurs and professionals for many centuries, a phenomenon which is considered extremely rare is that of a lunar ray. More specifically, when the rising or setting sun is at a very low angle relative to a lunar feature such as a crater, even a couple of degrees, sunlight may pierce through one of the clefts in the crater's wall and project a ray across the crater floor. Although observational reports of such rays date back to the mid-1800's, there exist but a few such reports and even fewer images. This project is something I started to pursue during the spring of 2003 after reading the excellent article by Robert Robinson in the Reflector (Dec/2002, pg 15). To date, reports indicate that these rays may be observed for only a handful of craters and only during a two- to three-hour window.
Crater: Maginus Quadrant: SW Lunar Coord: 6.3° W, 50.5° S Diameter: 194.0 km Height: 0 km Rukl: 73 Lunation: 08d 01h 51m |
Note: Seeing very poor including thin clouds and slight winds. |
Date: Jul 07, 2003 20:50 - 21:06 UT+3 Location: Athens, Greece Equipment: Celestron 14" SCT Losmandy G-11 Philips ToUCam PCVC 740k Video Imaging: 9 AVI / 3640 frames
Software: K3CCDTools V1.0.6.460 AVI2BMP V0.49c (US) CCDSoft V5.00.112 Photoshop V6 Processing: Selective Sampling (91/3640) Alignment Stacking (Ave Combine) Richardson-Lucy Deconvolution Maximum Entropy Unsharp Masking JPG Compression |