by Pete Lawrence
Hi, photo editor Michael E. Bakich here. I've uploaded Pete Lawrence's incredible Moon image (with his permission) because 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.
Click here for a much, much larger version of this mosaic.