More WTA moon photos

Tired of looking at the moon? I hope not. I'm in the grip of an astronomy mania, and as long as you're in this corner of the blogosphere you're along for the ride. Took these last night, as well as an extremely dirty and blurry picture of Comet 17/P Holmes, which was so bad I will not show it. Still, my first comet pic and all. In fact, my first comet, period. Also saw Mars and the Great Nebula in Orion, once the clouds had blown away.

One of these days I will start labeling features but right now I am just grooving on the awesome desolation in all its unadorned majesty. My inner 10-year-old is in his LEGO Cosmic Cruiser, zooming over those craters on the lookout for the secret Zangblarffian base.


The moon is waning, so as it rises in the East the shadowed side is up. Images in my Newtonian reflector are rotated 180 degrees, as is usual for telescopes without image erectors. If I wanted right-side-up images I could just hold the camera upside down, but that's kinda pointless since you can achieve the same result by flipping the images after you download them. No, the problem is that the shadowed-on-the-bottom moon, as seen through the telescope and as shown here, just looks better and more optimistic than the shadowed-on-the-top moon. Some would say that makes me a rank and hopeless slave to aesthetics, but those people are themselves slaves to the arbitrary conventions that make North equal Up and the view from some random point on Earth equal Right. As an enlightened being I am able to escape from all that.

For at least an hour or two, on clear nights, anyway.

P.S. Just spent five minutes staring at the photos instead of posting. I want to go there. So freakin' bad. Burt Rutan, NASA, I don't care who, but somebody better get the lead out!