You may have wondered why my gallery - apart from occasional eclipse events - contains almost no lunar pictures. Yes, it may be the boredom originating from the lack of atmosphere, the ever same appearance, almost no colour...

But encouraged by the new solar photography equipment update and invited by the easy setup I thought I should give our cosmic neighbour another look. In late spring when the waxing crescent moon is still comfortably high to avoid bad atmospheric turbulences I thought it would be the right time to shuffle my light equipment to a trade center in the outskirts of Vienna. I still stayed with my favourite lunar and solar imaging equipment, which is my 80/600mm ED refractor. The upgrade that I mentioned was a larger 2x Barlow lens, ending up in less vignetting and better flatfield correction.

With the new technology that came and went since my last advanced lunar imaging in 2006, I used my regular astrocamera with single shots. I did not care about video sequences because sharpness and distortion sometimes worked against each other, coming up with suboptimal compromises. As there was - with additional sharpness - some residual colour aberration, I decided to delete the blue and red channel and focused on the center of optical correction performance.

Please klick on the image above to see the high resolution version. If you zoom into the close-up, focus your attention at the border between lunar day and night, the so-called terminator! This is where sunlight falls at the mountains and craters in a very shallow angle and therefore enhances the contrast of landscape features and reveals fine detail.