Crater Piccolomini with a Nikon D70 DSLR at prime focus + 3X TeleXtender on the Meade 8" LX200-ACF every night from 12 October to 26 October 2010. Some nights were clear and some nights had thin clouds in front of the moon. I captured an image each night from local sunrise to local sunset, or as near to that as I could get, to show changing shadows. This was my first attempt at such a project so the results are not quite perfect, but I think it turned out fairly well. There was some image rotation (due to camera positioning) and some image distortion (due to clouds). And near the Full Moon in the middle section of the animation, details are pretty well obscured by the sun being overhead and some cloudy nights.

I created the animation by cropping each of the 15 images to show just Piccolomini, adjusting as much as possible the image rotation to line up the features (not always successfully due to image cropping constraints), adjusting various image settings (exposure, contrast, definition, etc.) to try to match the scene for each image to reality, and then adding each frame to a GIF image file. Hope you enjoy the results.

Go to the Cassiopeia Observatory Astronomical Videos page.