Announcing the winner of our ‘Shoot the Moon’ photo competition

18
Jan
2017

So congratulations to Samuele Draghi from Milan whose photograph (below) impressed Nicolas the most. Samuelle wins £100 worth of Cambridge astronomy books. Nicolas said: “This image makes the best use of basic amateur astronomer’s equipment. It’s a mosaic image (addition of images resulting from movies taken some tens of seconds apart), compensating for the very narrow field of view of a standard planetary camera with a long-focus telescope. The reconstruction of the whole image is seamless. The sampling is perfectly appropriate, resulting in good balance between the resolving power of the optics, the atmospheric turbulence, the inevitable interpolation of the color sensor and the limitation in contrast with such an effective focal length. the soft processing clearly reveals the differences in albedo of the lunar soil and accurate topographic details. A worthy winner.”

WINNER

Location: Milan, Italy

Equipment: Celestron C8, ZWO ASI 120 MC-S, Barlow 2x

And the three runners-up who each receive a copy of Dupont-Bloch’s book, Shoot the Moon are Jonathan Green, Luigi Fiorentino and Christian Mazhi.

RUNNER-UP

Location: Leigh, New Zealand

Equipment: Canon 6d at ISO200 through a Samyang 14 mm lens set at f/4.

Nicolas said: “This is a spectacular image of a lunar halo. The relatively uncommun subject takes advantage of a superb framing and a obvious mastery of photography.”

RUNNER-UP

Location: Monte Pollino (2200 m), Viggianello, Italy

Equipment: Canon Lens (90 mm at f/4.5) and a DSLR Canon 650D.

Nicolas said: “This beautiful and rich conjunction with earthshine was one of the most visually captivating images of the competition and is extremely clean.”

RUNNER-UP

Location: Brittany, France

Equipment: Televue NP 127 IS on AVX celestron mount. Fuji X-Pro2 camera at prime focus. ISO 200

Nicolas said: “Thanks to delicate processing, exemplary focusing and multiple exposures, the image shows the subtle shades of the real colors of the gibbous Moon while the relief of topographic features is perfectly rendered near the terminator (the boundary between the lit and the dark parts).”

Fifteen Eighty Four

Academic perspectives from Cambridge University Press