Sometimes, sometimes you just get lucky. Lucky enough that buying lottery tickets suddenly doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.
Back in February, on the night before it was full, I was outside photographing the moon. It was cold enough to make my hands stiff and that combined with the “bounce” I was getting when I pressed the shutter (I couldn’t find my cable release) was resulting in less than satisfactory results despite using a tripod. I finally set the camera to use a 30 second timer so that any vibrations had time to settle and, just for kicks, to shoot five continuous frames when the timer fired.
That seemed to take care of the issues I was seeing, so I shot a half-dozen five-frame sets and went back into the house. After downloading the photos, I started browsing through them, discarding almost all the earliest shots. Then I came to the last three frames of one of those five-shot sets and was a little surprised at what I found.
I had no idea there were geese anywhere remotely near. I hadn’t even heard any flying overhead. And yet, there they were. What are the odds of catching that flock by pure chance? Astronomical (pun intended), I’d say.
Those first three photos were only resized and sharpened a bit. Here’s the shot I was actually trying for, corrected for levels and color.
That large ray crater just below center on the right is called Tycho. Apollo 17 astronauts collected samples of the ray and analysis of those samples shows that the crater is relatively young, about 108 million years.
I was sure the name “Tycho” was of Greek origin (sounds Greek to me!), but the crater is actually named for the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601). He made many contributions to astronomy, but the reason I remembered reading about him was because he lost part of his nose in a duel and thereafter wore a metal insert over the missing part. Sounds like an interesting fellow, eh?