The diameter of the moon is about 2160 miles, or one-fourth that of the earth. It moves about the earth at an average distance of 238,857 miles, and at an average speed of 2300 miles per hour. It completes one revolution around the earth in 27 days 7 hours and 43 minutes 11.5 seconds. One lunar month (one phase of the moon to the next similar phase) is 29 days 12 hours 44 minutes 2.8 seconds. Although the moon appears bright to the eye, it reflects into space only 7 percent of the sun’s light, and it is full when it is farther away from the sun than the earth.

Since the moon is our closest neighbor it has held us all, scientist and poet, young and old, captivated throughout the centuries that humankind has roamed the earth. And thanks to an invention called the telescope, we’re able to see for ourselves many of the unique features of the moon’s surface. That coupled with XCam2, brings the moon right into our living rooms, straight to our television sets.

Tomm Aldridge really likes the moon. He hooked up the NightWatch black and white camera to his Celestron 8" SCT. Then he used X10’s Wireless VideoSender and Receiver to transmit the raw data to his VHS deck. Later he transposed the picture to a DV format, and finally created digital pictures out of his shots.

"What’s really cool" Tomm says, "is that you can select outstanding frames from the video one at a time to get rid of atmospheric turbulence effects." As you can tell, Tomm has definitely done this before. He even had pictures to show us.

The images he sent us are Copernicus, a 93 km diameter crater, and the next is a shot of Tycho and Clavius (Clavius is the larger of the two). "I made this setup to give school kids an easy view of the moon and planets through the telescope" Tomm told us, " and I’m finding it to be a lot of fun here at home.

Tomm is using X10 to enhance his sky watching, and quite frankly, we’re all excited about what else can be done. How about those meteor showers that we try to watch from time to time? Or the next solar or lunar eclipse? Wow, this could be something completely revolutionary.

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