Amateur astronomer and imager Pete Lawrence of Selsey, England, just sent me a fabulous lunar mosaic he created. This image is so incredible that I wanted to share it with all of you.
The amount of effort Pete expended to create this image astounds me. He captured the individual frames April 2 when the Moon was at First Quarter phase. He shot through a 14-inch Celestron Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope at prime focus (f/11). In all, 166 frames make up the final image. Each of those frames originated from 800 exposures taken with a Lumenera SKYnyx 2-0M CCD camera. And, to top it off, he assembled the final mosaic by hand using Adobe Photoshop.
We posted two versions of the image: one in the Sun and Moon gallery of our Online Reader Gallery, and a much larger version here.