The Moon
The most recognisable object in our night sky. It waxes and wanes through the course of a month - actually it doesn't. It waxes and wanes every 28 days or 13 times a year. It's about 3,500km (2,175 miles) in diameter and orbits at an average distance of 384,399km (238,855 miles) and we've been there!
Of course, the Moon is visible by day as well as night - if you want a good picture of it on your phone then it's probably better to try when the sky is blue. The phone won't overexpose the Moon itself (as in the above shot) because the background is so bright. So you can get pictures like this with your phone.
You can see some detail here, the photo is actually better if it's smaller, so people viewing this on their phones will think me a better photographer than I am.
One last shot from my phone - this taken at night but using a tripod and professional mode...
Much more detail there. But what can I do with my telescope. Well, for one I can't get the entire moon in one shot. I have to take a mosaic and put it together using some sort of photo editing suite. I use GIMP which is extremely powerful and also free. I also chose to take a video of each segment rather than a single frame. I used AutoStakkert to stack up each frame of each video and then used Registax to sharpen the image with it's wavelet functions... The final image is actually too big to show here, but I will put up two smaller versions - they are both the same data but with slightly different processing.. hope you like them.
