Planning the Experiment

The last-quarter phase Moon

However, the phase of the Moon has to be taken into account before an observation can be carried out by the telescope, otherwise there may be a delay of several weeks.

Before carrying on, you might want to do some research on the Moon and its changing phases, and then ask yourself the following questions:

• What is the best phase at which to observe the Moon?

• At what phase will lunar montains cast the longest shadows?

Because the Liverpool Telescope only captures a tiny piece of sky when it takes an image, we cannot capture all of the Moon in just one shot. In fact it would take a mosaic of over 100 images to get a full picture of the Moon using the LT's main detector.

We therefore need to think carefully about which regions of the Moon we want to observe.