This is wonderful!!! Generalizing here but we really do take the moon for granted.
I bought a 'big ass telescope' a few years ago in an effort to bootstrap a hobby that I'd flirted with for decades but never really committed to. It's a Celestron 11" SCT and I really had no idea what I was getting into. When I think of space I think of things that are really small in the night sky, planets, galaxies, nebula...(turns out most of them aren't *that* small and I overshot the targets I had in mind)
I kept trying to photo galaxies and star clusters and all of these exotic things but had a bunch of trouble with tracking with long exposures. Out of frustration I ended up just pointing it at the boring ol' moon to at least get used to the equipment and workflows.
I fell in love with Luna.
The magnification of this scope really allowed me to explore the surface in a way I never had before. I got to know the 'map' and suddenly related to our celestial neighbor in a whole new way. It was also the very first image I was actually not embarrassed to share - https://imgur.com/a/t9b1Uug
I since then improved my knowledge and technical skill but the month of the moon at the end of 2021 was really pretty spectacular for me.
That’s incredible. Illustrates how incomprehensibly big galaxies really are. There’s a thing 2.5 million light years away which still appears 4x bigger than the Moon.
> just imagine if you could see all those galaxies and nebulae with your naked eye
I think I’d wind up buying the Vision Pro if it can realistically portray seeing the world in a wider spectrum than our eyes can. I don’t want cartoonish images of objects pasted into the sky. I want to see what I would perceive if we e.g. gene therapied a few extra cones into our eyes to see more of the EM spectrum.
For people thinking of getting into moon gazing try binoculars first!
Laying down on your back, plopping a nice pair on your eyes and just looking at the moon is a fantastic experience. Aside from much better UX, binoculars also have depth-perception which makes the visuals all that more engaging.
If you have really nice clear sky in your area you can easily do that with stars and some planets as well.
I was a kid living in Botswana when Halley passed earth.
We watched it every night through binoculars.
Marvelous clean air - humidity around 0%, just some dust. No light pollution (there wasn't an electricity grid in some 100km around, just a handful of small diesel aggregates).
The binoculars were more than enough to see the comet, its tail. And even get a feeling of the tail arcing in three dimensions.
Depth perception? I would think objects as far away as the moon shouldn’t produce a meaningful difference between the left and right eye. But that does tell your brain they are far away, so perhaps that’s what you mean.
This is great advice! It's really amazing how much more you can see with a regular decent pair of binoculars. I treasure the memory of being able to see some of the star clusters that I could only vaguely make out with the naked eye for the first time, now I basically bring them every night walk :).
I think the problem is that I would like to have an image stabilized version of that. Even small ticks of you fingers amplify quickly into shaky images.
I think instead of an eyepiece (or in addition to one) most consumer telescopes should include a usb image sensor that can screw into where the eyepiece is.
I’m sure it’s different for everyone but I think it would just be the unbridled enthusiasm and love for the subject that they would show, the tidal dopamine surge of all the mysteries that have been unlocked, the validation of all the mysteries that remain. It would be amazing.
I have the same fantasy. I think it’s appealing because I imagine they’d be able to appreciate all the amazing things behind it more than most people, dead or alive.
Similarly, I came to learn some selenography writing a "voxel" (well, ray-casting) web game ... where you shuttle about the moon from crater base to crater base.
I became kind of fascinated with the craters, names of the craters (and history of those names), the "dark-side" and all the wild topology there. (Although I think I have tiles for the entire Moon, you don't have the fuel to get there.
I really like that one, so sad that the framerate tanks after one or two flights. Tried all the settings on the debug menu but only reload helps as you stated in the documentation. Happens both in firefox, firefox developer without plugins and in chrome.
I remember playing another moon lander 35 years ago in school on the swedish computers "Compis". Was a very basic version but I still loved it, it's something with slow heavy objects where you need to plan ahead what, when and how much you need to do.
Welcome to the hobby (even if a few years late). Pretty much everyone has the same experience as you. You buy the telescope, and then realize you need to buy a telescope for your telescope to use as a guide scope for accurate tracking for longer exposures.
However, those long exposures are much more likely to get photobombed by an airplane or satellite. So you're really better off taking shorter exposures with the highest ISO you can get away with, and then just stacking them.
I have a much wider scope that I can do 30s exposures unguided before trailing starts to become noticeable. If you can get away with 15s, you'd be amazed at what you can achieve with newer sensors.
Just some hints to help the disappointment at bay and maybe get you playing with the toys
I really like the way you caught the craters along the terminator, including the one at the bottom where you see sunlight on one rim and the rest is visible only because of Earthshine.
The Moon is such a great subject that you can also get some nice shots with just a camera and a telephoto lens. Here are a couple of mine.
The shadows are very much my favorite part of this kind of shot. It provides so much visual texture to the surface, showing not only how rough it is but how smooth it is. the 'scar' to the bottom right (aka Alpine Valley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vallis_Alpes) is always one of my favorites.
Pretty much every telescope owner will happily show you the sky - after you've made an effort finding out where they gather, or if you just happen to walk by. The instagrammification of astronomy, with hordes of influencers rolling by without concern for the subject matter, just to insert themselves everywhere, is too horrible to consider.
It's not hard to find. Type "<city> astronomical society" into your search box. They have public websites, horribly outdated. Reach out to them, join the group, and you're more than welcome. But may there never be "an app for that"
Just search for local star parties in your area. Although, be willing to bend the definition of local depending on how light polluted your area is. My local is 4 hours away. Also, some colleges have viewing nights available. Even in light polluted areas, you can still see things for public viewings. They just suck for anyone wanting to image.
There are tons of sites listing them, but I doubt there's an absolute exhaustive list as it's all self-reporting to each of the sites. Your app idea would just be another in a list of places, sort of like the xkcd app about yet another standard.
Here in the EU you can look for "dark sky parks" which are basically parks or areas in nature designated for night sky viewing because of the low amount of light pollution and they are great spots to meet people, I'm pretty sure you have these in the US as well. I advise bringing a red light if you have to do some walking. Another recommendation would be to see if you have any actual observatories near you, some of them have events for the public every now and then. The people in this community are some of the friendliest I ever met and love sharing their interest and enthusiasm.
An SCT11 should have no problem making out the rings of Saturn and maybe a band or two. But it's not a good beginner scope. Long focal lengths are hard to manage if you don't know what you're doing
Does this come with the page/code to store, or is there a good way of doing this? I looked a while back for properly archiving pages and their code but things were all in the works, maybe that's more solved now.
This kind of thing seems like a truly outstanding resource, and I'm happy to pay for it, with the desire to have this for when my kids get older.
Related: last Sunday (December 15th) was the *luna*stice - the northernmost endpoint of the moon's 18.6 year cycle during which the rise/set points move between north and south. On Sunday it was as far north as it gets, and for the next generation it will move slowly south and then back again.
This cycle has been known to some humans for more than 3000 years, and appears to have helped structure architecture/layout at various American locations such as Chaco Canyon (New Mexico) 1000 years ago. It takes a minimum of 3 generations to establish the cycle, which indicates something about the level of social and scientific organization in these societies.
As a big fan of both the Moon and ciechanow.ski this article is right up my alley.
During the 2024 solar eclipse I was explaining to people how an eclipse must occur during a new moon, and this article would have really helped. The discussion also made me realize how little most people spend thinking about the solar system and the relationship between the moon, sun, and earth. These things fascinate me (I think it's just the sheer scale of it all), and I hope to be able to get more people interested as well. The solar eclipse was great for that!
People are impressed if you can name the current moon phase and tell them what it'll be next. But it only takes a mental model of where the sun, earth, and moon orbits are relative to each other. I also find people are intrigued by the concept of earthshine, and often haven't noticed it until you point it out.
For a waxing moon the circular arc is on the right hand side and for a waning moon the circular arc is on the left hand side [Here in the Northern Hemisphere].
It would have been nice if the mnemonics Decreasing & Cresting worked but they don't. I personally use Developing & Collapsing to refer, respectively, to the waxing and waning moon. Has anyone a better couple of words than these?
The really satisfying thing for me was when I was on a sailing course and was instructed in how the moon causes the tides, and how the phase of the moon corresponds to springs and neaps.
Thinking about how the Moon, a body over 380,000 kilometers away, can perfectly block the Sun (something 400 times larger than itself) because of their relative distances is just mind-blowing for me
Really excellent. Since I live in a high rise I've marked the cardinal directions on the floor and walls and been trying to develop a spatial intuition for the ecliptic, essentially trying to be able to easily imagine myself tilted in the northern hemisphere subtropics rotating around a sphere rotating around the sun. End goal would be an automatic intuition of where to look for the Sun, Moon, and all the visible planets. This sounds insane typing it out but its very passive and genuinely satisfying. Not being on the equator and the natural tilt of the Earth are the two factors that make this most difficult, of course.
It's not insane in the least. I try to always make a point of observing the ecliptic when I travel, it creates a wonderful interconnectedness to places all over the planet. There are going to be some lovely conjunctions in the next few months that will provide a great opportunity to share this with people. It's actually pretty intuitive when there are 3 or 4 visible planets in a row once someone points it out.
I built an ecliptic pathfinder in the Black Desert in Egypt a few weeks ago. It's a piece of land art comprising three piles of rocks on the near horizon, each marking the position of sunrise (if you are stood in an approx 200 metre by 5 metre strip) for the summer solstice towards the north east, the spring and autumn equinoxes to the east and the winter solstice towards the south east.
Check out the North Paw Directional Anklet. It’s basically a compass that vibrates whenever you face magnetic north. From what I’ve read people seem to develop a sense of direction pretty quickly.
Ciechanowski is likely the best content producer of our time, absolutely fascinating reads. Imagine having such a person as a teacher - he could probably excite students about any scientific topic.
I'd love to spend my time working on such articles when I'm retired :)
Can we give reference of these articles to LLMs and get them to write articles like this for educational contents and produce similar WebGL graphics code to render images. I mean, just use this style and produce educational content using AI. that might make the studies more interesting.
The Moon also plays currently a very special role in my life and my work days are dictated to a large extent by the current Moon phase :)
It's not discussed in the article but we have detailed models (ROLO[0] and LIME[1]) for how much light is reflected from the Moon and can be captured by a telescope. Like this one can radiometrically calibrate a telescope, that is, find a mapping between the digital numbers coming out from the sensor and actual radiance values.
At my current employer, Kuva Space, I'm among other things responsible for the commisioning and in orbit calibration of the payload. The Moon is a major calibration target for us, and between waxing and waining crescents I spent a lot of time analyzing Moon shots to perform radiometric calibration and camera parameter optimizations. The Moon doesn't know about weekends and images are not always downlinked at the most convenient times so that makes my life a bit more hectic.
My wife is a social worker at the county welfare office and swears there is a strong correlation between phase of the moon and the nature of her work with the homeless. To the point where where she checks the calendar to schedule more time for crisis handling around the time of the full moon.
Readit News
I bought a 'big ass telescope' a few years ago in an effort to bootstrap a hobby that I'd flirted with for decades but never really committed to. It's a Celestron 11" SCT and I really had no idea what I was getting into. When I think of space I think of things that are really small in the night sky, planets, galaxies, nebula...(turns out most of them aren't *that* small and I overshot the targets I had in mind)
I kept trying to photo galaxies and star clusters and all of these exotic things but had a bunch of trouble with tracking with long exposures. Out of frustration I ended up just pointing it at the boring ol' moon to at least get used to the equipment and workflows.
I fell in love with Luna.
The magnification of this scope really allowed me to explore the surface in a way I never had before. I got to know the 'map' and suddenly related to our celestial neighbor in a whole new way. It was also the very first image I was actually not embarrassed to share - https://imgur.com/a/t9b1Uug
I since then improved my knowledge and technical skill but the month of the moon at the end of 2021 was really pretty spectacular for me.
I haven't realized Andromeda is 4x bigger than the Moon until I tried to take a picture of it
https://mikkolaine.blogspot.com/2014/01/size-of-deep-sky-obj... (not my picture)
I think I’d wind up buying the Vision Pro if it can realistically portray seeing the world in a wider spectrum than our eyes can. I don’t want cartoonish images of objects pasted into the sky. I want to see what I would perceive if we e.g. gene therapied a few extra cones into our eyes to see more of the EM spectrum.
Laying down on your back, plopping a nice pair on your eyes and just looking at the moon is a fantastic experience. Aside from much better UX, binoculars also have depth-perception which makes the visuals all that more engaging.
If you have really nice clear sky in your area you can easily do that with stars and some planets as well.
We watched it every night through binoculars.
Marvelous clean air - humidity around 0%, just some dust. No light pollution (there wasn't an electricity grid in some 100km around, just a handful of small diesel aggregates).
The binoculars were more than enough to see the comet, its tail. And even get a feeling of the tail arcing in three dimensions.
I think instead of an eyepiece (or in addition to one) most consumer telescopes should include a usb image sensor that can screw into where the eyepiece is.
"Wow so many lights" is the first answer I can think about right away
I became kind of fascinated with the craters, names of the craters (and history of those names), the "dark-side" and all the wild topology there. (Although I think I have tiles for the entire Moon, you don't have the fuel to get there.
I remember playing another moon lander 35 years ago in school on the swedish computers "Compis". Was a very basic version but I still loved it, it's something with slow heavy objects where you need to plan ahead what, when and how much you need to do.
However, those long exposures are much more likely to get photobombed by an airplane or satellite. So you're really better off taking shorter exposures with the highest ISO you can get away with, and then just stacking them.
I have a much wider scope that I can do 30s exposures unguided before trailing starts to become noticeable. If you can get away with 15s, you'd be amazed at what you can achieve with newer sensors.
Just some hints to help the disappointment at bay and maybe get you playing with the toys
I also bought a Seestar S50 last year and have been having an absolute blast with it. Feels like a renaissance in astronomy is upon us.
Deleted Comment
I really like the way you caught the craters along the terminator, including the one at the bottom where you see sunlight on one rim and the rest is visible only because of Earthshine.
The Moon is such a great subject that you can also get some nice shots with just a camera and a telephoto lens. Here are a couple of mine.
Moon over Menlo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/geary/24118398766/
Moon, Mars, Venus: https://www.flickr.com/photos/geary/16598905865/
The shadows are very much my favorite part of this kind of shot. It provides so much visual texture to the surface, showing not only how rough it is but how smooth it is. the 'scar' to the bottom right (aka Alpine Valley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vallis_Alpes) is always one of my favorites.
Thanks again!
(startup/app idea!)
Pretty much every telescope owner will happily show you the sky - after you've made an effort finding out where they gather, or if you just happen to walk by. The instagrammification of astronomy, with hordes of influencers rolling by without concern for the subject matter, just to insert themselves everywhere, is too horrible to consider.
It's not hard to find. Type "<city> astronomical society" into your search box. They have public websites, horribly outdated. Reach out to them, join the group, and you're more than welcome. But may there never be "an app for that"
There are tons of sites listing them, but I doubt there's an absolute exhaustive list as it's all self-reporting to each of the sites. Your app idea would just be another in a list of places, sort of like the xkcd app about yet another standard.
https://www.go-astronomy.com/star-parties.htm
https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-resources/annual-starg...
https://www.reddit.com/r/telescopes/comments/pmlbne/jupiter_...
i'm sure with tracking and stacking it would be much more.
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The one for Moon is at https://www.patreon.com/posts/on-moon-118130286
This kind of thing seems like a truly outstanding resource, and I'm happy to pay for it, with the desire to have this for when my kids get older.
This cycle has been known to some humans for more than 3000 years, and appears to have helped structure architecture/layout at various American locations such as Chaco Canyon (New Mexico) 1000 years ago. It takes a minimum of 3 generations to establish the cycle, which indicates something about the level of social and scientific organization in these societies.
During the 2024 solar eclipse I was explaining to people how an eclipse must occur during a new moon, and this article would have really helped. The discussion also made me realize how little most people spend thinking about the solar system and the relationship between the moon, sun, and earth. These things fascinate me (I think it's just the sheer scale of it all), and I hope to be able to get more people interested as well. The solar eclipse was great for that!
I'm speechless
Hey, that's the first the time I realized this.
Also full moon rises the highest in winter, contrary to the sun - when it’s at it’s lowest[1].
Funny things happen at the poles where sun is above/below horizon for half a year: https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/a/27750
[1] the further from equator you are the more pronounced it is.
I'd love to spend my time working on such articles when I'm retired :)
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It's not discussed in the article but we have detailed models (ROLO[0] and LIME[1]) for how much light is reflected from the Moon and can be captured by a telescope. Like this one can radiometrically calibrate a telescope, that is, find a mapping between the digital numbers coming out from the sensor and actual radiance values.
[0] https://www.usgs.gov/media/files/rolo-lunar-model-and-databa... [1] https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/24/3649/2024/
Could you explain further?
Like with all the other articles, it is straight up readable JS, with WebGL graphics, no dependencies.
Only kidding. Cool stuff, wish it were split up though