Full Moon, July 2020

Moon This image was created from 60 separate exposures on a Panasonic S1H camera. It was converted to Tiff images in Photoshop CC2020 and the loaded into AutoStakkert 3 for aligning and stacking.  The Wiener filter in Pixinsight was used to de-blur the image and final processing was done in Photoshop CC2020. It is interesting to compare this image of the full moon to the earlier one taken in September 2017. They are definitely very different. The difference comes from the fact that the Moon has an orbit around the Earth that is 5 degrees tilted relative to Earth’s orbit around the Sun so we see different parts of the “full” moon depending on how the Moon and Earth line up during the full moon phase. We always see the same side of the Moon but not always all of it. The truly full moon is when all three are aligned and the Earth eclipses the Moon. The difference comes from the fact that the Moon has an orbit around the Earth that is 5 degrees tilted relative to Earth’s orbit around the Sun so we see different parts of the “full” moon depending on how the Moon and Earth line up during the full moon phase. We always see the same side of the Moon but not always all of it. The truly full moon is when all three are aligned and the Earth eclipses the Moon.