Mooned!

 

 

For thousands of years humans have been looking up at the moon. There is much folk lore about it as well. For example the common thinking is that human behaviors are changed by the full moon. Statistically, there is no correlation between the full moon and human behavior! Still when the moon is full we just seem to notice the weird and abnormal things more. These events happen daily but we seem to notice it when the moon is bright and high in the sky! So the moon is a catalyst of dreams and thoughts!

One of the first telescopic targets was the moon. Galileo turned his new instrument the telescope, on the moon and was astounded that it had craters, mountains and maria (seas). This did not fit into what was thought at the time. All learned men from that age knew that the moon and all heavenly bodies were perfect and unblemished! When Galileo sketched the moon showing all of the imperfections we know about today many did not believe that he actually saw this through his magic glass. In the 1960’s NASA spent a great deal of time and money observing and imaging the moon in order to better identify a landing site for Apollo. The moon is still a great target today for any size telescope! Even a small telescope will show many wonders.

The stark beauty of the moons landscape is unchanged, even after eons of time. When we observe it we are swept out to space to hover over this stark surface. It is the closet thing to actual space travel that we can achieve without actually leaving the earth! Take time to enjoy the moon!

The above image was taken with an 11″ Celestron CPC telescope, an SBIG ST-2000 CCD camera, Ultraviolet filter, 0.02 second image and stitched together with Imerge.