After taking many images of the planets over the last couple of months with this amazing little ZWO camera, I decided to slew over to the 8 day old Moon and see how it went along the terminator line…and I must say I was blown away by the detail on the surface of the Moon!
 
I didn’t want to change any of the settings or adaptors on the telescope as I was just filling in time until Mars had gone over the zenith. My telescope when in Alt/Az mode does not like pointing straight up into the sky, it seems to spin on its base and not track properly, but when it’s in equatorial mode I have not trouble at all. (I use a 10inch LX200 Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope).
 
 The first image shows what is known as the big three craters, Ptolemaeus, Alphonsus & Arzachel with the other large crater Albategnius to the right of Ptolemaeus. To get some prospective on how large some of these craters are Ptolemaeus is an incredible 153 km in diameter and 2400m high!
 
The second image shows some stunning detail of the lunar mountain range called Montes Alpes and the 3600 m high Mons Blanc (Mt Blanc) with the 180km Alpine Valley running through it.
​Also on show is the extremely bright mountain peak called Mons Piton (Mt Piton) at 2250 m high on the smooth Maria called Mare Imbrium (Sea of Rains).
 
The large flooded crater (to the right) is called Cassini and is 57 km in diameter and has two crater inside called Cassini A and B.
 
With this phase of the Moon we are seeing sunrise on the terminator line (day/night horizon) and everything on the sunlit side is being thrown into sharp detail. (Images taken last quarter Moon on the 18th September 2018)
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AVI movies were captured with about 3000 frames as the seeing wasn’t great, there was also some light cloud in the sky so the surface of the Moon was a bit wobbly…but RegiStack6 did great in stacking the images…I’m very happy with this little camera for planetary imaging :-)

Please go to my NASA’s Saturn Observation Campaign education link to see and read all about another wonderful evening where we showed members of the public the beautiful planet Saturn and other celestial objects in the night sky…. it was awesome!
http://www.mystardustobservatory.com/nasas-saturn-observation-campaign.html

The night sky here in Australia at the moment is a stargazers delight with the brilliant planets Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and Mars all beautifully displayed across the night sky. A few nights ago I got one of those very rare moments when the seeing went ever so calm and I managed to get some outstanding images of Saturn high up at the zenith :-)
 
I then overexposed the disc of Saturn to see if I could capture any of the moons, and to my delight there they were five of them, the three moons in the shape of a triangle were Enceladus, Tethys and Dione, the two moons further out were Rhea and Titan.
 
The second image is a composite because I had to use two different exposure times, a shorter one to capture the body of Saturn, and a longer exposure time to capture the faint moons of the planet.
 
Images were taken with a Meade 10inch LX200 telescope and a ZWO ASI 120 MC-S colour CCD camera with a 3x Barlow attached. AVI movie files were captured and then processed in RegiStax6 and PS CS4.

My first time I've ever captured some of the moons of Saturn, they are Enceladus, Tethys and Dione, with Rhea and Titan further away from the planet.