One would not normally photograph the Moon in H-alpha light, since the moon is seen by reflected sunlight. However, the AAT is a large telescope working at F/3.3, so its image is very bright at the focal plane at prime focus. Since AAT exposures are normally very long the camera is fitted with a hand operated roller-blind shutter which is too slow do snapshots, so the solution to photographing the moon is to use a slow photographic emulsion and a narrow band interference filter.

Despite these precautions the resulting plate was a very dark negative that was impossible to print normally. Eventually it was copied by using an unsharp mask that controls the large scale contrast while leaving the fine detail, and the image here is the result. It's a pretty good picture of the moon!. But there's no record in the plate log of why it was taken, or by whom.