Looking for the X on the moon, a photo from last night

I realized that the moon was at a phase where an x appears as a lit up object near the terminator. It was fascinating to view this,

I didn't take my canon eps with me to the observatory, so I decided to try to get a photo of the moon through and eyepiece using my iPad mini 3. I had loaded a few different HDR photography programs which will use the burst mode in the more advanced iPads and iPhones. I decided to try to get a picture using Fusion which is a $2 app on the iPad. I was able to tweak the settings to get a decent image. This image is not as good as one could get with a better camera setup, like a canon EOS camera mounted directly in the telescope or using a astronomy, webcam like camera. Since I didn't have those cameras handy and was in a bit of a hurry I decided to go with the iPad.

Handholding an iPad near the eyepiece to get a good image is a bit of a challenge. There was quite a bit of movement in the image when viewing the moon with the naked eye through the eyepiece. One could see the results of hot air corrects in the atmosphere. Some may have been from the heat being released from the observatory walls, some heat may have been higher up in the atmosphere.

The image isn't as sharp as I'd like it to be near the top of the moon. This due to the blur effect of the optics near the edge of the field and an iPad camera and the eyepiece not being perfectly aligned for photography.

The image may look like it has a lot of detail, and it does, but the live detail in the telescope was much better. Without complex stacking programs and taking video and stacking many exposures, most cameras fail to show the details you can see live when looking through the telescope. This image is probably 4 to 8 times less detailed than what one could see at the eyepiece. The only positive thing is there is no waving atmospheric heat effects in this image of course and I'm able to exposure and tweak the brightness and contrast which may not be as easy for us to do without a dual polarizer filter in the eyepiece. The moon was actually quite bright in the c14. And we often use filters to darken the moon when viewing it though a large telescope.








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Location:Last night I decided to open up the observatory and look at the moon and Saturn