Waning crescent moon in daytime sky -- natural view. Photo by Ari Heinze.

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The moon rules the night, but is often visible in the day. Sometimes, when high in a very clear sky, it seems more real in the daytime than at night: it looks like what it is, a huge round rock very far away. At other times it looms faint and ghostly through haze. This morning was an in-between case: the moon was washed out substantially by the bright sky, but still possessed a clear and delicate beauty.

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.
Image dimensions before resizing	about 2400x1800
Focus	Fair
Motion blur	Negligible
Image noise	Very low
Other technical comments	None.

Copyright 2011 Ari Heinze: all rights reserved.

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