Lying within Mare Fedunditatis (Sea of Fertility), the two craters Messier and Messier A can be seen at the centre of this image (Messier is the left one). Taken around midnight on 13th January 2009, with the moon around 16 days old, the characteristic ejecta plume shows well emanating towards the south west of the pair.

They are referred to as pristine craters because they exhibit none of the usual signs of deterioration, such as slumping crater walls, other crater impacts or basaltic lava fl...
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If you look towards the east late at night at the moment you'll see Leo rising with Saturn some 10° below Leo's hindquarters. Around magnitude 0.8, Saturn is nowhere near its brightest, all because the rings are presented almost edge on to us. Twice every 29.5 years Saturn's rings appear edge on to the Earth due to the inclination of Saturn's orbit relative to the Earth. On 13th January I caught my first images of Saturn this season, combining some short exposure sequences of the planet with...
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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...

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