Hi all,

Find here the last image coming from Dec. 1 session featuring Tycho and
environs.

The high Sun angle putted on evidence a dark grey and opaque aureola at
the feet of the crater, can you see that? This is less prominent on the
southern side according to the ejecta direction.
I never noticed this before, I guess it’s a debris accumulation.

http://www.lazzarotti-hires.com/images/moon/tycho20061201_lazz.jpg

Another session to follow in a while.

Hi all,

Find here a wide view over 2 interesting craters grabbed in a low sun angle.

http://www.lazzarotti-hires.com/images/moon/gassendi-letronnè20061201_lazz.jpg

Tycho area to follow.

Hi all,

Here a wide image showing the western side of Mare Imbrium from
Gruithuisen down to Prinz and Mons Vinogradov (extreme bottom). Thiny
rilles as Diophantus, Delisle and Brayley are here barely visible.

My attention was caught by that odd feature on the left (western) side
of Gruithuisen crater next to the dorsa: that sweet hole in the ground
looks like a reversed dome! I never noticed it before, can someone tell
me what is it?
Gruithuisen Delta mount also features an odd crest, it looks like a
rooster!

http://www.lazzarotti-hires.com/images/moon/gruithuisen-prinz20061201_lazz.jpg

More to follow.

Hi all,

Here’s the big Herschel crater at sunrise.

http://www.lazzarotti-hires.com/images/moon/herschel20061201_lazz.jpg

More to follow.

Hi all,

On Jan. 10 after a cloudy period with light rain lasting since 4 days
and 4 nights (!!!) I had a quite unexpected clearing around local
midnight when I was going to bed. Fortunately, I noticed my thermo
falling down to 9°C (it was parked at 13°C for several days) and I
decided to go out.

Quite poor transparency due to the heavily wet air (it stopped raining a
few hours before) and thin cirrus. Seeing mediocre at the start and
reasonable around 2 AM.

I must confess I wasn’t expecting such results!
Find here an RGB image:

I took this in 2×2 binning mode and 200% resampled through the Iris’
Drizzle command. No particular activity noticed at this longitude.

After that, I tried to use the unbinned mode taking away the IR blocking
filter and using the R filter by alone. The poor transparency caused a
weak and noisy signal, so I averaged the best 4 streams I could capture
within half an hour. No WOS detected in any stream, so I could do this
with no problem.

I was amazed in having had such a result:

The color layer is coming from the RGB image as above.
Can’t wait for a good seeing!

Hi all,

On December 1st I had an interesting session featuring a variable
seeing, mainly poor to fair with occasional and short spells of good
enough stability. As always, I was forced to hand pick a thin number of
best frames from the blob.

Let me start with this high sun angle view of a well known area starring
Hesiodus CC in all its glory.

http://www.lazzarotti-hires.com/images/moon/pitatus-hesiodus-wurzelbauer-gauricus20061201_lazz.jpg

More to follow.

Hi all,

After having spent a quite critical period, I’m now clear enough to
start again with processing old lunar stuff I recorded over the past 2
months. Hope 2007 will be definitively erasing 2006 from my mind.

On November 8 I got definitively crazy after having seen usual low
clouds rolling in after a very sunny day, so I packed my scope and I
drove far away my home.
At the end, I arrived at the top of Amiata mount, southern Tuscany, 280
km far away!
I could have a cristal clear and almost steady sky. An annoying
directional stream caused an image elongation toward NW which I
partially corrected by convolving an artificial PSF along that direction
and then deconvolving the image using that PSF image.
The improvement was huge, maybe I’d have trashed anything without that
processing!

Find here my useful images I captured over that crazy session driving
lonely for 560 km in the heart of the night.

Snellius & Petavius - Note the extremely rough Petavius floor under a
very low sun angle:
http://www.lazzarotti-hires.com/images/moon/snellius-petavius20061108_lazz.jpg

Taruntius and environs:
http://www.lazzarotti-hires.com/images/moon/taruntius20061108_lazz.jpg

Jansen crater and rille and environs - In this high sun angle image you
can also see Plinius (top-left corner), Vitruvius (top-right corner) and
Carrel (bottom-left) craters:
http://www.lazzarotti-hires.com/images/moon/jansen20061108_lazz.jpg

Cleomedes crater:
http://www.lazzarotti-hires.com/images/moon/cleomedes20061108_lazz.jpg

Janssen crater:
http://www.lazzarotti-hires.com/images/moon/janssen20061108_lazz.jpg

As you maybe noticed, I always used an extremely thin number of frames,
so the processing was critical as well.