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August 24, 1999 12am-1am
Tonight was pretty good for eyepiece viewing of the moon. The atmosphere was a little hazy, but the temperature was good and the moon was nearly full. I played around with some different camera settings, but unfortunately didn't get a complete mapping with the first set. The idea was to make a complete composite. For this session I hung an extra weight on the eyepiece to steady the scope. I targeted the western edge of the moon and waited for her to cross my field of view and just snapped (clicked my "snap" button) shots as she went. This worked *really* well and only occasionally required a hand on the dobsonian pivot point to make sure the scope didn't rise. It was stunning to watch the moon trek across my screen in realtime with every frame.

All images were taken with a modified B/W Connectix Quickcam at 320x240 and later pasted together with the GIMP.

• Composite moon top. I really like this one - too bad I didn't get the rest of her at this quality. This wide-angle is made up of 6 or 7 different frames.
• This composite is huge, but my camera settings were mediocre and the registration is a little off. Now that I'm pretty comfortable with this and have my process ironed out I'm going to try one more comprehensive mapping in the next month or so. Keeps your eyes peeled for gallery4.
• This is a fun tiled version of the above that I've got on my desktop.