I’m not exactly an amateur astronomer, but I love the sky: night, day, looking up at it from the ground, flying through it in a little metal tube. Here’s a waning gibbous moon. We think of the man in the moon, but different cultures have seen different things. There’s a rabbit to be found there that I’m sure will turn up in a photo here, but in this photo, you can nicely make out the woman in the moon. I won’t belabor it much, but the mares along the terminator are her hair, even including a bit of an ear; there’s a darker spot for her eye, a line for her mouth, then a chin, neck, shoulder.

Anyway, Nikon’s Coolpix P1000 is really made for lunar and (with a filter) solar photography, and does a decent job with other subjects as long as the light is good. The craters along the terminator are nice and crisp here and there’s a bit of a sense that this isn’t a flat disk the way it seems to be at night, but a real globe.

October 2, 2024. Nikon Coolpix P1000 (1/2.3-inch sensor), focal length 503mm (35mm equivalent: 2,800mm), f/8, 1/500, ISO 1,600.