Photographic lunar distances

Update, September 2020: I've written some code to estimate the Moon's position against the stellar background on images similar to those below. It's available at my GitHub repository here: https://github.com/pmonta/lunar-astrometry


These images were taken on November 30, 2009 at 08:29:43 UTC. The location is 37d 25' 58" North, 122d 11' 14" West.

The 1537 images are the 1/80 sec exposure and the 1538 images are the 1/5 sec exposure.

Original camera images:

img_1537.jpg (1.8 MByte)

img_1538.jpg (2.2 MByte)

img_1537.cr2 (Canon RAW) (9.5 MByte)

img_1538.cr2 (Canon RAW) (9.8 MByte)

Below is a thumbnail of img_1538.jpg with contast stretched to show the stars. The reddish bright star in the lower right is Hamal; you can see a few dozen others throughout the field. Looking at the raw file is probably better, but the JPEG seems usable.

Checkplot from astrometry.net with detected stars:

Thumbnail of this checkplot:

FITS images (turned 45 degrees with green pixels only), compressed with gzip. The 1538.fits file contains a WCS (world coordinate system) that, together with a FITS image viewer like ds9, gives a (ra,dec) location for each pixel.

1537.fits.gz (5.1 MByte)

1538.fits.gz (6.8 MByte)