Mystic contemplation.

[The Warthog]

The sky was partly cloudy when I set up my scope tonight, and I was hoping that the clouds would disperse. I had a pretty busy day getting tyres on the vehicle, and buying some doors and starting to hang them to replace some damaged ones. Managed to pick up a bicycle taillight, and put a little velcro on the back, and also on the bottom of the screw that holds the mount to the tripod, and it makes a dandy light for the eyepiece tray. Also, the little piece of velcro doesn't interfere with me putting it on the bike if I need a taillight at night.

Unlike some other astronomers, I like looking at the full moon. It is a kind of meditation to me, to see the flat, bejewelled looking surface of the moon with the only detail the maria and some bright highlights, like Aristarchus, which always looks to me as if someone had dripped a bit of Liquid Paper on the map of the moon. Of course, the weather being the perverse thing it is, the clouds got thicker and thicker. At first it was kinda fun, watching the cloud drift like smoke across the surface of the moon, but soon I was waiting longer and longer for gaps in the clouds which became smaller and smaller, until when I looked north, I saw that there was a bank of solid cloud descending on me, and packed it in. Naturally, when I had finished putting the scope away, The moon appeared brightly and briefly in a gap in the cloud. C'est la guerre. I only used one ep tonight, the 12mm X-Cel, which nicely contains the entire disk of the moon.

Still, there's no such thing as a bad night behind the eyepiece.