The waxing gibbous Moon on february 25th 2007 taken from my back garden. I hand held my Fuji S5600 5.1MP camera to the 32mm 1.25" eyepiece attached to a home made 8.5" F/7 dobsonian reflector. It was difficult to get a sharp image as a cool breeze rocked the scope and my hands shook from the cold but I ended up with a fairly decent result all the same. The southern highlands (right) were looking very striking and to the far left in the low northern lowlands you can see smooth, dark, Plato just inside the terminator. There was a nice libration this night which threw Mare Crisium to the lunar west bringing more elusive detail onto the eastern bright limb. The large impact basins of Mare Marginis and Mare Smythi can be seen. - because of the effects of Libration we can observe some 59% of the Moon's surface from here on Earth!

Martin Mc kenna.