Alternative Moon Perception

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Sun in April, 2020

April 2, 2020

Better Than a Quarter Moon

August 31, 2017

This is the exciting finale to a trilogy of posts about my August 30th Moon adventures.  The first showed the Waxing Gibbous Moon from that night.  The second explored several of the Moon’s craters.  And now here is the story of what came next.

As I finished up my astrophotography for the evening, I detached both the camera and eyepiece setup from my Dobonsian’s focuser.  I had, just moment before, been taking my last pictures, so the Moon was still in the telescope’s field of view.  With the focuser empty, I noticed the very bright light emanating through, like a flashlight.  This was, obviously, the Moon’s light still reflecting from the primary mirror, off the secondary, and through the focuser hole.

I have observed this “flashlight” before, but usually considered it for only a moment as I would be in the process of packing up my equipment for the night.  But on this pleasant evening for the 30th day of August, I decided to play with the light a little.  I put my hand in front of the focuser and could see the blurry image of the Moon upon it. Moving my hand around allowed me to focus the Moon, directly on my hand.

I thought this was the end of the exercise.  But when I put the dusk plug back onto the focuser, Moonlight was still shining, this time through the translucent plastic.  It is a very simple cap, and if you are unfamiliar with these telescope dust plugs, they look like this.

Adjusting the focuser allowed me to bring the Moon into focus, right on the cover of the dust plug.  It was a strange sight.  It reminded me of the small view screens that attached to some home film projectors in the 1970s.

The Moon, but not the Moon.  Quickly I detached my smartphone from its mount and took several pictures of the phenomenon.  The above is one of those images with only minor post-processing.  The diagonal streaks across the Moon are the grains of the dust plug’s surface.

I got a lot of value out of that Moon observing session.  Right now, the Moon is waning and nearing the next New Moon.  Unfortunately my weather forecast is cloudy through the weekend; I want to get back out there and find Pluto one more time this year.