The waning moon

A series of short exposures through a near-infrared filtre was obtained of the waning Moon at sunrise on January 12 (at about 10 hrs UT), i.e. about 5 days before New Moon (24.3 days "old"). As can be seen in the image, the edge of the full field-of-view is about the size of the diameter of the Moon. Several 0.1 sec exposures were made through a near-infrared filtre (856 nm; FWHM 14 nm) with small offsets were recombined (to cover the gaps between the individual CCDs); otherwise, the image is raw. It was rebinned (2x2) to 4kx4k size and sampling 0.48 arcsec/pixel. The right-hand side of the picture was cropped in this reproduction to reduce the file size