Moon

Click on image for larger version.

Our only natural satellite is a quarter of an Earth-diameter across, and thirty Earth-diameters away. It is made up of the same sort of material as the Earth, but it lacks a hefty iron core, so the Moon probably formed when a large planetoid struck the Earth and blew off a large amount of material four billion years ago.

In this image, the Moon is ten days old and about 70% illuminated. You can tell that sunlight is coming from the right, leaving the left side of the Moon in darkness (and that's all there is to the phases of the Moon; you are not seeing the Earth's shadow!).

Clicking on the image at left will download a 504 KB version.

Equipment

Meade 16in LX200 telescope operating at f/20
SBIG ST8E CCD camera with color filter wheel

This image is a mosaic of eleven blue-filter exposures of .11
seconds each. The aperture of the telescope was stopped
down to four inches (10 cm), and the chip was set to
high resolution, or binned 1x1. The final image
was 2684 by 3440 pixels before resizing for
display.
  • Unsharp mask was applied to the final image.

    • Minimum credit line: Steve White/NOAO/AURA/NSF

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    Updated: 8/20/2000