Waning crescent moon in daytime sky -- severely contrast enhanced. Photo by Ari Heinze.

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While the daytime moon does not look like this except in extremely clear mountain skies, this enormously contrast-enhanced image begins to show that the daytime moon is still the same object we know at night: boosting the contrast helps the familiar maria, craters, and other features show more clearly through blue haze.



Date/Time

February 25, 2011, about 08:57 CST

Equipment

Home-built eight-inch F/5 Newtonian telescope plus Nikon D3000 DSLR

Settings

Telescope stopped to about F/20 using cardboard mask. Film speed set to 100 ISO. Single-frame exposure time 1/60 sec; 9 frames stacked for a total equivalent exposure of 9/60 = 0.15 sec (though the frames were merged by averaging so that the longer exposure produces lower noise rather than a brighter image). White balance auto.

Image processing

Cropped; 9 individual frames stacked as varying-transparency layers and then merged in Adobe Photoshop; resized for web to 1500 pix width. Contrast enhanced 100% twice.

Image dimensions before resizing

about 2400x1800

Focus

Fair

Motion blur

Negligible

Image noise

Low

Other technical comments

None.

Copyright 2011 Ari Heinze: all rights reserved.

However, requests for any reasonable use will likely be promptly granted by email.

Please email any request
to use this image to ariheinze[at]hotmail.com