The Waning Crescent Moon this morning – right now.
💥💥💥💥
Go have a look if you’re up ! One of the advantages of being in the lifetime habit of staying up to a ridiculous time in the morning is that I sometimes get to see this beautiful sight.
So, although I’m feeling I’ve lost the art of Instagramming, I wanted to share this. Of course, this crescent shows a completely different part of the Moon from the part we see lit up as a ‘new moon’, so it has its own character – to me, much more mysterious, and magical.
Okay, this is not a super high-quality image. But I was pretty surprised to get anything approaching a usable photo of the Moon with an iPhone and no extra gear. Recent iPhones have been notorious amongst astro photographers for being incapable of focusing on objects like this. But the new iPhone 14 seems to be just a little bit better. I can still find no way to manually set the iPhone camera to infinity (does anybody have a way of doing that?), But with a bit of patience, pressing the screen until the square box appears, and asking it to focus, my new phone seems to eventually manage it. Then you can adjust the exposure by sliding your finger up and down on the screen. Of course, this isn’t even a proper stereo, because in the few seconds between exposures, there was no chance of getting any kind of baseline, but because these are two separate photographs, when viewing in stereo, our brain is able to separate out the real details from the noise, and we can be sure that we really ARE seeing some detail on the surface of the Moon with a naked iPhone !!! That’s another little known advantage of stereoscopic imaging. Enjoy !
iPhone movie of the waning crescent moon (💥 and the planet Jupiter) this morning.
Brian May: Waning crescent moon – 12 Jul 2023
– https://youtu.be/WxBCS2A9nm8
You can see me attempting to refocus towards the end, and – eventually – the result is… not bad! Hurrah for the iPhone 14 !
Bri