Photo of the Week for October 19, 2018

This may not be the very best photo of the first-quarter Moon ever captured, but it’s pretty darn good. I expect more than a few readers would be quite happy to achieve a result as richly detailed. However, what makes the image remarkable is that it was captured with a smartphone held up to the eyepiece of a telescope. Although technically known as the “afocal method,” capturing a lunar portrait really doesn’t get much easier than this.

Kris Fedick of Rosslyn, Ontario, snapped this Moon shot during twilight on May 31, 2017, with a Galaxy J5 SM-J500 and a 10-inch Meade LightBridge Dobsonian reflector. The image presented here is essentially what came directly out of the smartphone—only cropping and a minor brightness adjustment were applied to render the final image.