My main interests in astro-imaging are deep-sky objects, particularly galaxies. You obviously need a dark sky for this, and the moon is usually a nuisance to me. However, with the moon high in the sky on these recent freezing nights, I felt the urge do some lunar imaging. I've not used my webcam for some months now, and with Saturn also rising earlier each night, I decided it was high time to dust off the webcam (an old Philips ToUcam Pro).

Yesterday (the 9th January) around 4pm but already -2°C, the heavy gibbous moon was low in the north east with Venus high in the south. I quickly unscrewed the focal reducer I normally use to widen my field of view for those faint galaxies and fixed in place the eyepiece tube into which I can fix my webcam. It was still light, but started up the scope and slewed her to Venus. The difference in focal ratios between my f/3.3 reducer and the native f/10 is a lot of turns of the focus knob. Since I do this relatively infrequently, I found I needed to make a note of the 7 1/2 turns clockwise turns. Next, put in an eyepiece, make sure the target is dead centre and then replace the eyepiece with the webcam. K3CCDTools, my webcam capture software, showed a slightly out of focus Venus, nearly at "half-moon" phase. A quick tweak of the electric focuser fixed that and I grabbed 500 frames.



Not the most interesting target, perhaps, but I now was ready to swing round to the moon. Being a day or two from full moon, the terminator was very close to the western limb, highlighting some of the foreshortened craters on that coast of Oceanus Procellarum, the largest lava 'sea' on the moon. I picked the crater Hevelius, whost rugged crater walls contrasted beautifully with the smooth texture of the basalt lava flows to its east. Hevelius is some 106km in diameter and 1.8km deep. The crater to its north is the smaller, but prominent crater Cavalerius.



As soon as I'd captured this, though, some low cloud flooded in and prematurely stopped proceedings. I went indoors and processed what I'd got. Didn't take long - Registax is so good! So having done some solar system imaging I went through some recent deep-sky images I'd taken and found the huge spiral galaxy NGC 2403 in the constellation of Camelopardalis (the Giraffe). Its 12 million light years away, quite close, which helps to make it a large target around 18' by 11'.




Its outer spiral arms are faint and don't really show up too well here, despite over 4 hours of exposure, but you can glimpse emission nebulae in the inner arms.

So I started the evening on some near neighbours before drifting back to a far off galaxy where there are countless Suns, planets and moons.