Two minutes of mooning

On the 14th of June, 2006, on a freezing cold night, I wheeled the huge old Philips studio camera out into the backyard, stacked all three of my 2× lens multipliers behind the zoom lens turning the 170 mm lens (at the telephoto end of the zoom) into a 1360 mm one, and aimed the camera at the moon (in an easterly direction, probably about 40° above the horizon).  (Those measurements refer to the optical parameters, not the physical length of the lens—it's actually about two feet long in this configuration.)  With the lens set up like this, and zoomed fully in, the moon is just a bit bigger than the entire screen size.

While these images aren't very remarkable to anybody who's used a real telescope, anybody who's tried to do this with most video or still cameras will know that you can't normally see more than a small bright spot if you aim at the moon—their lenses just don't have the magnification.

The following series of pictures were taken over a two minute period, as the moon drifted through the camera's field of view, taking the output from the green channel and digitising it on a simple video capture card.  Ultimately it took around four minutes for the moon to move completely into frame and out again, but the beginning and end don't really show enough.  I made an MPEG movie of the moon moving through the camera's field of view, it's about 17 megabytes big, and it runs at about two or three times the real speed due to some quirk of how the video capturing and encoding was done.

Unfortunately the camera is very old, so the video quality isn't too brilliant, it suffers badly for not really having enough light coming through the lens.  The lens isn't too fantastic, either.  The optical quality isn't stunning, and it's the main cause for the lack of light (especially with all those magnifiers).  For those reasons I opted to take just a monochrome signal from the green tube, to avoid registration issues, the lack of signal from the red and blue tubes in low light, and chromatic aberrations in the lens.  Even if I'd made full-colour pictures, you wouldn't have seen much colour in the images.  The last time I looked at the moon through a telescope, its colour looked, pretty much, like grey concrete dust.