July 9, 2006

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Flying Over Tycho

lunar-scenic-flyby-20060707LPOD.jpg
image by Anthony Ayiomamitis

Last night while observing I saw a bird fly in front of the Moon. I’ve seen this before, but I’ve never come close to imaging it. I have never seen an airplane silhouetted against the Moon, and I know of only a handful of such ephemeral photos. That is exactly the sort of challenge that attracts Anthony Ayiomamitis, the amazing Greek photographer of the sky and everything in it. And Anthony has now captured a Moon spotted by an aircraft. Questions naturally arise about capturing a spacecraft in front of the Moon - and of course Anthony has already done that too for the International Space Station. But we will probably not see for a long time a silhouetted image of a spacecraft in orbit about around the Moon, for the largest of forthcoming lunar vehicles is likely to be only a few 10s of meters long, and so far our best resolution from Earth is a few hundreds of meters. We need larger telescopes, or better yet, larger lunar spacecraft.

Chuck Wood

Technical Details:
July 7, 2006. AP 160 f/7.5 StarFire EDF + Losmandy G-11 GEM + Canon EOS 300d.

Yesterday's LPOD: The Baby & the Skull

Tomorrow's LPOD: Craters and Papers


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