My friend and former cohort Max McNeil, pinged me these close-up shots of the lunar eclipse from last night. According to his Flickr set, he’s using a Meade LX90 and taking photos by holding his small digital camera up to the 2″ eye piece.

It always amazes me that the backyard astronomer can easily now do what was not very long ago only in the hands of big-budget labs and universities.

The University of Arizona’s HiRISE program showcases ultra high-resolution photography, consisting of a “0.5 meter reflecting telescope, the largest of any deep space mission, which allows it to take pictures with resolutions up to 0.3 m resolving objects about a meter across, or the size of a beachball.”

According to a description, “launched in August of 2005, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) is flying onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) mission. HiRISE will investigate deposits and landforms resulting from geologic and climatic processes and assist in the evaluation of candidate landing sites. By combining very high resolution and signal-to-noise ratio with a large swath width, it is possible to image on a variety of scales down to 1 meter, a scale currently afforded only in glimpses by landers. HiRISE will offer such views over any selected region of Mars, providing a bridge between orbital remote sensing and landed missions. Stereo image pairs will be acquired over the highest-priority locations with a vertical precision of better than 25 cm per pixel.”

If you’re not already familiar with it, go visit the Astronomy Picture of the Day and then come back to visit it again every day. It’s worth a stop just for the imagery, if not also for the accompanying text description, which gives insight into whatever went on to capture the scene. I’ve been visiting every day for as long as I can remember.

Run by NASA’s Goddard Flight Center and Michigan Tech University, it has been in operation since 1995.