Tonight's Moon...

It's a lean Christmas in Monasterevin this year...box of crayola for Christmas between the pair of us and even at that we had to buy them in the second-hand shop!

BTW, I did a bit more research into the colours issue. Apparently, the blue areas are titanium rich, orange areas are titanium poor and purple areas are iron poor. Interesting! I never knew one could get that sort of info from such a simple photo.

So the colours are geologically real and not just imaging/telescope artifacts, thats great stuff.
I cant decide whether I prefer the first or second image.

Here's a false colour image from the Galileo satellite as it passed the moon:
solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm?Object=Moon

Another url here:
curious.astro.cornell.edu/moon.php

As you can see, the colours in the Galileo image match up with those on my image, albeit the Galileo image colours are much more prominent.

Thats a nice comparison Mike, and all it took was overloading the colour depths in Photoshop!

Hi all,
Nice to see Deirdre's Moon Sketch. Also, have a look at James O'Connor Mars sketch at www.irishastrosoc.org home page.

Many Astronomy Guides have a simple moon map, Tirion's Cambridge Star Atlas and the Atlas of the Night Sky spring to mind.

The standard in Astronomy is that all drawings have south at the top, this has been kept to for many decades. Howver, in some popular articles such as in Sky&Telescope they have put north at the top, very disconcerting for long time Mars Observers! The same applies to scientific photos, except pretty pictures.

John
Director of Observations
IAS