Moon obscured by ominous clouds -- Photo by Ari Heinze

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I had taken many images of the moon with my 20" Classic Obsession telescope and CCD camera in the months preceding this image. The Obsession CCD images could be joined into high-resolution mosaics, but I couldn't capture the whole moon at one shot -- the CCD field was too small. I wanted to be able to take dynamic images of the moon, where something was happening that couldn't be captured in a mosaic taken over minutes to hours. So I put together an eight-inch F/5 Newtonian reflector with a home-made focusing mount to carry my Nikon D3000 DSLR. On the very first night that I really got it working, I was blessed with these dramatic clouds blowing across the moon -- just the sort of thing I had built the telescope for!

Date/Time	February 18, 2011, 20:06 CST
Equipment	Home-built eight-inch F/5 Newtonian telescope plus Nikon D3000 DSLR
Settings	Telescope stopped to about F/20 using cardboard mask. Film speed set to 800 ISO. Exposure time 1/10 sec. White balance auto.
Image processing	Essentially none. Resized to 1500 pixel width for web.
Image dimensions before resizing	3872x2592
Focus	Fair: slight blurring is obvious in the full-resolution raw image.
Motion blur	Insignificant or absent.
Image noise	Moderate: typical for the film-speed setting.
Other technical comments	None.

Copyright 2011 Ari Heinze: all rights reserved.

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