The Moon: between 1 to 2 days old

Capturing the Moon when it is at a very slender phase is something of a challenge. The images below show my attempts to catch the fine crescent moon. From my location, I only have a small area of sky visible to the west. The best time of year for me to image is from March to July. To date, the youngest moon I have ever caught is 30 hours old. Mainly I image the moon with a 6" F6 Newtonian at "Newtonian" focus, with a ToUcam webcam. This requires making a mosaic of the various parts of the crescent imaged. For a crescent this young I usually need five or six processed images to create a complete mosaic. Each AVI is usually about 20 second's long. sometimes shorter if the conditions are poor and I need to be quick. A good exampe of this is the image below taken on the 9th of May 2005. I had a very small patch in the cloud cover to image through. All five avi's were taken in just over two minutes, before the clouds rolled back in (phew).

Click on the images below to see as full size version.