LPOD Apr 9, 2008
IS IT REALLY THERE?
image by Pete Lawrence
Visually sighting very thin crescents is an endless competition, with naked eye observers and imagers striving to achieve a nearly impossible goal. Here is the latest contender with the least Moon published in an LPOD. Pete writes:
After a freezing session on the beach, I have finally managed to beat my previous personal best (22h45m) thin crescent Moon and catch the April 6th 15h13m crescent just before it sunk below a cloud deck. It never fails to amaze me as to just how hard these really thin crescents are to catch. With hands like blocks of ice I had a smile similar to the thin crescent.
I guess the last line means that the smile was hardly there.
Chuck Wood
Technical Details
On image
Related Links
Pete's website
COMMENTS
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(1) With the Moon rather strongly librated to the south at the time of this observation, the limb (the farthest points visible from Pete's location in Selsey) ran fairly squarely through the middles of all the major eastside mare, but Humboldtianum would have been centered on the extreme cusp of the crescent on the right (and hence pretty much in darkness). Since the image is so difficult to extract from the noise, its hard to be sure, but I'm guessing the broad patch of brightness on the left is Mare Australe, followed by the dot-dash of Smythii and Marginis (with Neper dark in between). The little blip on the far right (if real) might be Gauss (which would have been straddling the terminator). -- Jim
