Stargazing During a Full Moon - There is More to See Than You Might Think

You have finally got a clear night and of course it is the full Moon. What are you going to do? Well, obviously you can observe the Moon directly, but you will have to use a moon filter to do that. If you do not then you are not going to see the fine details.

There are also a lot of interesting details you can see on the moon itself. Including lunar mountains and shadows passing across craters such as the famous Lunar X crater shadow.

Other than the Moon you won't see much during a full Moon since the Moon is so bright it will just saturate most things you look at in the night sky.

Of course, there are some other things the bright planets that's Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn they are all good targets during the full moon.

Another favourite of mine is star clusters there is quite a few of them like the Pleiades and other such as the M103 open cluster. Similarly, globular clusters are a good target since they are bright tightly packed groups of stars orbiting our galaxy. A good example of a bright globular cluster is the great globular cluster.

Another favourite target during a full moon is to look at binary and trinary stars and other multiple star systems, especially some of the more colourful ones. My usual approach is to split them apart to see if you can resolve the different components stars of the star systems.

Of course, this is just a brief summary of what you can do during a full moon, so to ensure your night isn't wasted, I've decided to create a YouTube playlist below. Of all the different targets that you can see during full moon, so keep an eye out for updates!

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