First LHO CCD Image

First LHO Exposure - Moon.jpg (148758 bytes)

The Moon with LHO's

28-cm Beardsley

Telescope and SBIG ST-7E

CCD Camera on

September 12, 2000

During the first week of September, 2000, the Southern Arizona rainy season dissipated.    For the first time since mid-June, clear, windless night skies returned to the LHO site.    And, in late July, the Santa Barbara Instrument Group (SBIG) ST-7E CCD camera, which had been ordered in March, arrived.      Finally, on September 12 (UTC),   the camera was installed on the Observatory's 28-cm Beardsley SCT telescope, and the first successful images were taken.

The first image, shown above, was of an intentionally unidentified area of the Moon near the terminator at mid-northern selenographic latitudes.      The exposure time was 0.11 second, with the telescope operating at f-10, and was taken through the blue filter of the RGB filter set provided with the camera.    The image has been minimally processed with the unsharp mask, contrast, and brightness functions of off-the shelf image-processing software.

This area of the Moon was chosen near the terminator, more or less at random, as an interesting mystery to try to identify it later. A few interesting lunar features that will be helpful in identifying the area are: the long rille (a very narrow, linear, canyon-like feature) in the lower left quadrant, running nearly vertically; the white streaks in the upper right corner, which are probably ejecta from an impact crater out of the field of view; the small, dark, oval crater with a bright edge, also in the lower left quadrant; and the large, bright crater just to the right of the bottom edge of the picture.

The picture was taken near full Moon, and the lunar terminator - the lunar sunrise/sunset line - is near the left edge of the picture. As a result, craters are seen in bold relief near the terminator, where the sun is low in the lunar sky. The sun is nearly overhead in the lunar sky in the area in the right two thirds of the picture, so there are almost no shadows there - craters have a "filled-in" look there as a result.

Similar exposures of this area of the Moon through green and red filters were also taken, as were many test exposures of anonymous star fields, to acquire experience in using the camera and the camera control software.