http://www.astrobin.com/242534/0/

So, this is the Lunar X formation, imaged by myself after seeing it for the very first time last week. I pulled the small scope out to the end of the driveway as I can lift that one and move it around. I got it to sync up on the moon, and boom, there was the X. I had to pull up several web sites to make sure I was looking at it, but yea, there it was. The "X" itself is visible for about 40 minutes each month, so seeing it is rare in that it does not always happen when visible to North America.

The "X" itself is formed from the high crater walls of four craters. When the sun rises over this part of the moon, mountains get lit up before the valleys just like they do on earth. These higher ridges from the "X" and it gets fainter and less defined as the sun comes over the valleys and lower terrain around this formation.

The photo itself was a pain. What you do is take a movie with several hundred images as fast as possible. in this case 600 images were captured. Some of the images will be blurry and some will be sharp; remember we are looking at space through the soup of the atmosphere which makes everything blurry. After collecting the images. you then use software to "stack" the crisp clear images together and reject the blurry images to get a better signal to noise ratio. Once the images are stacked you take the new image into some processing software that can sharpen the data in the image and stretch the gamma and contrast to dig out more data and detail in the image.

Collecting the data itself is pure science at this point. Making it look pretty is the art. And I don't do the art piece well. I'm getting better, but as a visual astronomy I enjoy looking at the stuff much more than taking pictures and making them pretty. I can't draw, I can't paint, I can't do music, but at least I can take a picture and make it presentable.

Edit to add the following picture. This was taken with a cell phone held up to the eyepiece on a holder to steady the phone. Expand the photo to see the "X" and the "V" right on the terminator line (line between the light and dark down the middle of the moon). The X is about 1/4 up from the bottom of the image, the V is about 1/2 way down the terminator.