The Gibbous Moon

This is the wider of two lunar portraits I made only seconds apart. Leaving a large field of black around the Moon makes it feel less like a diagram and more like a world suspended in space.

The dark patches are ancient lava plains called maria, while the brighter southern region is crowded with impact craters. Along the curved boundary between lunar day and night, low-angle sunlight makes the surface relief especially easy to see.

Deep-sky targets can take an hour or more to emerge from stacked exposures. The Moon is the opposite challenge: it is so bright that the goal is to hold onto surface detail without letting the sunlit terrain wash out.