I first started to take images of the moon properly in 2019 as I immersed myself in the little barren rock. The moon lies around 239,000 miles (384,000 km) from earth. The moon is approx 4.5 billion years old which, coincidentally, is the same age as earth.
I took this image of the moon in 2021 with my Nikon D5100 attached to my Skywatcher telescope — I think I took around 350 images, ISO 800, then stacked in Photoshop and processed the image to reveal some of the mineral colours on the moon's surface.
Astronomers think the moon was formed by a massive collision during earth's early days. The theoretical planet was called Theia. The resulting debris ejected from that collision coalesced to form what we now call our moon.
The word moon can be traced to the word mōna, an Old English word from medieval times. Mōna shares its origins with the Latin words metri, which means to measure, and mensis, which means month. So, we see that the moon is called the moon because it is used to measure the months - source: Wikipedia
Astronomers say the moon is tidally locked, which is why we see the same face of the moon all of the time. The moon does wobble a little, meaning we technically can see a little bit more of it from time-to-time. This wobble is called the libration.
A misconception about the moon is that is has a dark side. Astronomers don’t call it the dark side; they call the far side. The moon is still illumined on the far side - it’s just that we don’t see it from our perspective.
And yes, I’m afraid we did land on the moon, and NO... NASA did not put images of the moon inside our telescopes. Sorry.
Below are some close up images of some amazing craters on the lunar surface that I took, believe it or not, with my mobile phone attached to my telescope. The daytime moon at the bottom left was taken with my DSLR attached to my telescope.
There are some absolutely astonishing images of the moon taken by astrophotographers such as Andrew McCarthy and more. Go and check them out: they are insanely detailed.
From top left the images below are: Clavius crater, Plato and Cassini in the middle of the same image (in this image, because of the moon phase, it looks like a little love heart). The right most image is some lunar craters called Ptolemaeus, Alphonsus and Arzachel showing right to left in this image.
The bottom left image is a daytime moon I took with my DSLR attached to my Skywatcher telescope, and the final image is that of Copernicus (bottom left corner of this iamge)
Copernicus is a huge complex lunar crater about 90km in diameter and about 2km in depth.
Copernicus comes after the Late Heavy Bombardment, and may well be less than a billion years old. The link here takes you to NASA website explaining more about this period in the moon and earth's history.
Thanks for reading this far.
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