The moon is back in fashion, but how well do you know it? It’s been over 55 years since Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the lunar surface, but with NASA’s Artemis 3 moon landing set for 2026 — or thereabouts — anticipation is building.
“Interest in the moon is ramping up. It will be in the media and the public eye more often. The average person will be exposed to it more than they have been,” said Robert Reeves, the author of the newly published Photographic Atlas of the Moon: A Comprehensive Guide for the Amateur Astronomer, a day-by-day photographic guide to observing lunar features through a small telescope, in an interview. “It’s going to be more than just an amateur astronomers topic — it will be a national topic.”
Imaging The Moon
Nobody knows the lunar surface like Robert Reeves, who lives in Austin, Texas. He’s been observing and imaging the moon for decades, throughout his life, starting even before Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969.
“I started taking pictures of the moon in the early 1960s with an ordinary 35-millimeter camera and a four-inch Newtonian reflector and got reasonable results,” said Reeves, who, since the digital era, has produced incredibly sharp images of the lunar surface. He uses a planetary webcam camera to record thousands of frames as a video as his telescope tracks the moon. “Software processes that video into a single TIFF image that is then imported into Photoshop for cleaning up and removing artifacts that look like real details,” he explains. “To do that properly, you need to understand what the moon looks like, identify these areas that are false details, get rid of them, and then enhance the details that are real.”
Over the last 20 years, Reeves has amassed a library of over 2,000 images, which he posts daily as a Postcard from the moon on his Facebook page.
Artemis Moon Missions
Does NASA’s Artemis excite him? “The exploration of the moon has gone through so many political cycles — both President Bush’s announced grand plans to go back to the moon — but it was a diversion from their political troubles,” said Reeves. “It soon faded from view.”
His hopes aren’t high for Artemis, and he wishes it was being followed more closely by the media. “The fact that it is finally moving at a glacial pace now is encouraging, but I’m disappointed in the direction it’s going,” he said. Reeves thinks NASA’s Artemis will prove far too expensive and mysterious. “There’s just not much transparency,” he said about the work of SpaceX and Blue Origin on the lunar landers now being designed to take astronauts to the moon’s surface for the first time since 1972. “It’s not like the old Apollo days, where every turn of the screw was public news — we’re in the dark about what’s going on, how billions and billions of dollars are going to be spent.”
Work Of Art
If Reeves is disappointed at not being able to follow the progress of the Artemis Project in real-time, it’s probably because he yearns for the incredible photography that lunar surface missions will likely produce.
His Photographic Atlas of the Moon is a work of art as well as a labor of love. Despite being 238,855 miles (384,400 kilometers) from the moon, Reeves uses just an 8-inch Celestron telescope and specialized planetary cameras to capture the exquisite geological detail of shadows thrown across craters, scarps and ridges. As well as being spectacular, the book is also well organized, making it of great practical use for touring the lunar surface, either as an amateur observer using a small telescope or a pair of binoculars, or as an armchair astronaut.
The images of our natural satellite are so sharp and detailed that NASA’s Artemis 3 astronauts will struggle to match the quality of Reeves’ work — even as they orbit the moon.
Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.
