Absolutely pathetic, ever since the Japanese space agency released the footage from their lunar orbiter I've heard the "HD" thing far too many times, it popped up again in more of my RSS feeds today, this time on more mainstream websites, which was the last straw, so it is time to rant.

The sole reason it seems to me for them to use this term is to get this mentioned on technology websites, and as such is nothing but marketing nonsense.

Let's actually look at the materials that have been made public. We've got some video footage on their website that is a pitiful 480x270 resolution, almost a quarter that of standard definition.

Unfortunately this really bothered me, I was expecting to find some gorgeous video from the spacecraft in orbit around the Moon in 1920x1080 and what I find is a disappointing 480x270 video. With the confusion surrounding HD in the general public at the moment we don't need the Japanese space agency adding to it, coughing up the term HD with such low-resolution video.

Why use the term HDTV in your press release if you're not actually including any 1920x1080 material on your website for people to download? I refuse to count the few still photos that are 1920x1080 they've released, no offence but your typical consumer camera can capture resolutions four times higher than that. The Apollo missions carried still cameras that used 70mm film, theoretically providing much higher resolution than 1920x1080.

Come on, just do the science and stop sounding like Ken Kutargi. You don't see ESA and NASA firing out press releases about images eight times the resolution of HD just because they released a new picture, why? Because those details are irrelevent.

Come on release the 1920x1080 video footage!

Yesterday evening I managed to snap Saturn and the Moon at an extremely close encounter, I would of got out earlier and taken some photos of them even closer, but I was busy trying to retrofit my Canon T-ring, with the thread from my Pentax T-ring, which was successful so I have pretty decent focus now when using my 350D at prime focus on my 6 inch TAL 2M reflector, it did delay me by about half an hour though.

There's a high resolution version on the gallery. I've still got a few more images of this too, so I may publish them at a later date, I'm thinking of merging two images together to get a better exposure on the Moon.

On Saturday, Venus and the Moon made a pretty close approach, we didn't get it as close in Europe as people did in the Americans, but it was a pretty close encounter nevertheless.

I've got the high resolution (3456x2304) versions of these in the gallery.

Here's the followup picture from my previous post.

We can use the Sun to help highlight the geography of the Moon, as the Sun slowly rises other the lunar surface light flood into vallerys and crators, or vast shadows are cast by mountain ranges. You can see this on the closeup below, the terminator isn't smooth, its all bumpy, even over the space of a few hours you can often see quite dramatic changes along the terminator as the Sun floods into areas of shadow.

Below you can see quite a prominant feature on the western rim of Mare Crisium, just as the Sun begins to rise over the highground around the sea.

If you go outside right now (even if its daylight), Venus is a few degrees south of the Moon. That makes Venus possible to spot in daylight assuming you've got really transparent skies. You'll probably need binoculars but its possible.

It also means the Moon is hanging around near Venus in the evening sky, here's a photo I took yesterday.

I've got high-resolution versions and close ups of the Moon on my gallery.

Weather permitting, I'll be taking one again this evening, the Moon would of moved up above Venus. This is because the Moon takes only a month or so to orbit the Earth, so every day it moves about 13° across the sky, the Moon is about half a degree in width which means it moves its own width about every hour compared to background objects. It orbits anti-clockwise when viewed from the north pole and so, compared to everything else in the sky it moves slowly leftward. Keep in mind the Earth's rotation is about 28 times faster, so we only see this movement relative to things behind it, the Moon still rises in the east and sets in the west.

I managed to take a few images of the lunar eclipse last week, I only used my camera with the standard 55mm lens. I was feeling too weak to drag the telescope outside and set it up. :)

There's two more photos and the rest of my astrophotographs on my gallery.