Over the weekend there was a bunch of hoopla over the “Super Moon”. While it’s true it’s the biggest full Moon of the year, it really isn’t that much bigger. Visually you can’t even tell the difference People thought it look huge, but that was mostly because they don’t look up very often and see the full Moon every month. All the hype bugged me, but it really shouldn’t have. I guess anything that gets people to look up is a good thing.

Amateur astronomer’s hate full Moons. They are super bright and wash out most of the sky making it harder or impossible to see other objects. It’s also the worst time to photograph the moon. When it’s full you don’t get any shadows and can’t see much detail in the craters.

Here are a few pictures I took of the gibbous Moon last week. You can see more detail in the craters on the side of the Moon that’s shaded. Near the terminator—the line the separates night from day—is always the best place to see crater detail, and you can see on the other side of the Moon very little crater detail is visible. I prefer a crescent Moon, but sometime you have to take what you can get when the clouds are gone.

Last night was a clear night and I was able to get somewhat decent pictures of Saturn. I’m still learning, so it’s not the best, but it’s still a picture of Saturn that I took from my backyard! The Cassini division is barely visible, but you can see a few moons. I believe the brightest moon in the upper left is Titan.

This spring I’ve been buying the parts to start dabbling in some astrophotography. I don’t have the best telescope for astrophotography, but I think I can get some decent shots. There is so much to learn about astrophotography, and that’s the fun part. I love learning. It’s probably my fault that we’ve had such a bad spring though. They always say buying a telescope guarantees a couple weeks of cloudy nights. So, sorry for the forecast of 7-14″ of snow tonight.

We did have one clear night last week that wasn’t too terribly cold, I think it was in the 20s. I was able to get this shot of the Orion Nebula.

It’s not the best, but it’s mine. If anybody is curious it was taken with a Canon 450D on a Celestron NexStar 8SE. It was just a 15 second exposure at an ISO of 1600 with minimal editing in Adobe Lightroom.

I’ve been experimenting with different editing apps trying to get the most out of my images, but what I really need is a clear night to get some more images. My time at getting more shots of the Orion Nebula is fading though. I may just have to wait until if comes around in the fall again. I think Jupiter is my next target.