Our closest celestial neighbour has kept us company for at least four billion years and has entertained our imagination in a variety of ways.
It certainly has been involved in our maturation as a species with man's first step on a body beyond our planet during the latter part of the
twentienth century and will, inevitably, be our first stop prior to any sort of manned travel to a further celestial body such as Mars. The
moon has been a great source of education about our own planet's evolutionary history; it has entertained many inquisitive minds from earlier
cultures and generations about the universe in general and man's role in particular; it has enriched the minds of young children taking their
first look through a telescope and continues to impact our lives in ways we may or may not readily recognize including tidal forces and various
natural rhythms and cycles.
Note: The image of the full moon below was taken at the
minimum perigee for 2010. The final step during processing involved the
inversion of the monochrome image so that the mapping of white and black as well as the various intermediate shades of gray would be reversed.
This technique is very useful and commonly employed for the identification of faint detail which would otherwise be more difficult to
ascertain in a normal image. As indicated by the image below, features such as impact craters and ejecta as well as minute crater(let)s are
now more visible with greater subtle detail and form.
Body: Moon Mass: 0.0123 x Earth Mean Eq Diameter: 0.2719 x Earth Distance: 356,790 km Sidereal Rev: 27d 07h 43m 11s Age: 14d 09h 16m Phase: 99.8° Diameter: 34.06' Magnitude: -12.6 Light Time: 0h 0m 1.2s Rukl: N/A |
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Date: Jan 30, 2010 00:31:28 UT+2 Location: Athens, Greece Equipment: AP 160 f/7.5 StarFire EDF AP 1200GTO GEM Canon EOS 350D Baader UV/IR-Cut Filter Exposure(s): 1 x 1/320 sec ISO 100 RAW image format 3456x2304 image size Manual Mode Software: Digital Photo Pro V2.1.1.4 Photoshop CS2 Processing: RAW to TIFF (16-bit) Conv Desaturation Cropping Brightness/Contrast Levels Unsharp Masking Resampling JPG Compression |