My Moon Montage of One Month

[stuart]

After a month of being on a 25-hour-a-day schedule and trying to photograph the moon every night, I got 23* out of the 28 days, with the 5 days missing due to clouds. Over the next year, I hope to fill in those gaps when the moon happens to be in that missing phase with the correct libration and nutation.

Because I produced each image at 100 by 100 inches and then shrank them to 10% and stuck them onto a montage that was 80 by 70 inches, I'm not going to physically upload the rather large (though shrunk to 25%) image to this site. You can see it at: http://burro.astr.cwru.edu/stu/me/ph...hases2_big.jpg .

The five missing phases all took place within one week, so I have constant images from the Full through New phase (last two weeks). I made these into a Flash movie that can be accessed from: http://burro.astr.cwru.edu/stu/me/ph...animation.html . Note that it is 2.6 MB. And note that the wobbling and size change are REAL, in that the wobbling is due to nutation and libration, and the size change is because the Moon actually changes size in our sky by about 10% over the course of a month.

Questions/Comments/Critiques/Compliments are welcome.

*Well, to be honest, I faked the 2% and 1% phases, and I used the 6% from back in March.

Pretty impressive. Also, the combined motion of the Moon's axial tilt is more complex than I thought!

[Diana]

Wow Stuart, very nice!!!.........the flash movie was very very impressive......






Diana

[stuart]

Thanks.

[The Mangler]

Very nice indeed.