Cresent Moon

Here's another moon shot. Click on it for the full size.

This is through the 6" Dobsonian, taken by hand with my Fuji Finepix 3.5 megapixel camera. Lots of glare on the moon tonight so it was hard to get anything decent using this method. Visually though, the moon was spectacular this evening, with lovely crater detail visible along the day/night terminator.

Actually, looking at the moon through the scope tonight got me thinking more about astrophotography in general. While it's nice to get one nice photo every now and then, you really do spend a lot of time getting all the equipment sorted out, all the software installed correctly, tweaking it all when in the field, watching your tracking etc etc etc. In the end, I think you do miss out on actually enjoying the night sky. G-d knows the last few times I have been out, it has been a very frustrating experience getting all this stuff sorted out. I have forgotten what it's like to just sit down with the scope and enjoy the sights. Maybe I need to take a break from the astrophotography and get back into visual for a while. I've really missed it. Next month is Messier Marathon time, and I'm toying with the idea of tackling it with my smaller scope, trying to find everything manually and without the aid of a GOTO scope. Might be enough motivation for me to get back fully into the visual side of things.