This evening I had a second chance to capture the full Harvest Moon. Conditions were not quite as good as in the morning, but the eastern limb shows up nicely.

I received a complement on my use of the Questar from a friend on the first image of this pair. This made me reflect on my choice of equipment that was designed 65 years ago.

I'm sure I could take these images with lots of other telescopes. Other than good glass, the Questar has two things going for it:

• Small compact size and light weight. The telescope, mount, tripod, and extras are all less than 20 lbs.
• Optical control box that controls two optical ports and a Barlow lens. It switches instantly from eyepiece to camera view.

These features make it fast and easy to set up and take images. I use it much more frequently than I would otherwise. This has given me the chance to learn a few skills in the last four years. My cost for the Questar per finished image is now down to less than $20 per image. This is well less than the minimum wage cost for the time to process them!

The Harvest Moon from Austin, Texas the evening of Oct 15. 2017-10-06 03:16 UT. Questar 1350/89mm telescope with Sony a6300 camera at prime focus. Exposed 1/50 sec at ISO 100 and f15. Best 13 images of 163, raw conversion Capture One Pro, stacked and deconvolved in Lynkeos, final exposure and crop in Photoshop.

The first image of this pair is repeated below for comparison. At full scale you can see that with the Moon higher in the sky, the better seeing conditions made this image more detailed.