image by Agapios Elia, Larnaka, Cyprus.
I write LPODs the night before they appear online. Tonight - last night for Wednesday viewers - my wife and I went out to dinner to celebrate my birthday, and I returned to my desk with the dread of having to come up with an LPOD. But in my email was this fascinating image from Agapios that saves the day - or at least this night! Look twice at the image. At first glance it looks like a stop motion photo of a projectile being shot through the Moon - all that is missing is the exit wound. On second glance it appears to be a series of images showing Saturn moving past the Moon. But Saturn moves very slowly across the sky… So on a third more careful glance, it must be a composite of exposures showing the positions of Saturn with respect to the moving Moon. And that is what it is - Agapios shot 24 images of Saturn and one of the Moon and put them together with Photoshop. And to finish my evening off, I looked out the door and saw the Moon high in the sky with Saturn a few degrees to the west.
Technical Details:
22 May, 2007. 24 x f/3.4 ISO 100 1.0"sec. for positional data of the planet
1 x f/4.8 ISO 100 1/20" sec. for the Moon. Combined and processed in Photoshop CS3
Yesterday's LPOD: Far Eastern Tranquillitatis
Tomorrow's LPOD: A New Myth
