Exploring the night sky

Sometimes, I think I get so caught up in the bs of life, that I forget the simple things in life, like looking up at the night sky, and just being amazed by it. A couple of weeks ago, I got a chance to play with a telescope in person for the first time in my life, which was fun. It was an Orion Spaceprobe 130mm, which a friend of mine just got that day. Though it was a full moon night, and too close to city lights to get a good look at much, though I hope to get a chance to use it again when its good and dark and just relax and explore what’s up there.
Strangely enough, with a little luck, I managed to get a few good photos of the full Moon.

I’m surprised they turned out as good as they did, since it was my first time really using either the camera or the telescope, and they were done just holding the camera’s lense to the telescope’s viewer. The camera I used was a Nikon Coolpix 7900, which is also my friend’s and fairly new. My digicam is a couple years old, so playing with a 7.1MP cam with optical zoom and many scene modes, that’s like, tiny, compared to what I’m used to was interesting. The original images are 3072×2304, though for posting I’ve resized them down to 1600×1200.
The first image I like the best, as it sits off-center and I think it looks really cool as a desktop wallpaper. The second one has the full impact that the Moon gives off though, frozen in time. I can’t quite put into words the feeling I get when looking at it. I’ve always just stared at the moon, even when I was a kid, riding in the back of the car on a long trip, just looking out the window at it. Its calm and peaceful presence looking down at me, till I fell asleep.