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

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Photoshop means power, which I have here flagrantly abused to create an image that still shows the real craters and maria, yet looks like no moon anyone has ever seen... Anyone want it for the cover a science fiction book?

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 increased 400% and brightness 100%
Image dimensions before resizing	about 2400x1800
Focus	Fair
Motion blur	Negligible
Image noise	Moderate due to enormous contrast boost
Other technical comments	The darkening at the lower left is from slightly nonuniform illumination of the stopped-down telescope's focal plane. This, together with some DSLR detector dust, is apparent only because of the enormous contrast boost.

Copyright 2011 Ari Heinze: all rights reserved.

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