An hour with the Moon

[Jove]

I got a quick hour in looking at the Moon this evening, the first time I have concentrated on the Moon for some time. The laptop battery was flat so imaging was out, which in some ways was a relief.

Anyway, these are my notes from the hour from 2030 to 2130. I drew a rough map of what I saw and then tried to figure out what the features were using some maps...

I used a 20mm Orion Expanse eyepiece throughout this gives a modest 75x, and a field of view that neatly contains the full disc of the Moon. I also used a blue filter to reduce glare and enhance contrast.

The terminator was roughly at longitude 15W, along its length the sun was rising over some spectacular craters. The most striking example (and most southery) of these was Clavius. The eastern wall was illuminated as was the top of the far western wall, but the floor of the crater was in shadow, apart from the rims of two smaller craters withing Clavius itself - these were very striking and to me looked like a letter 'u' above a letter 'o'. This would be great to image under similar conditions. As the hour went by I think more of these crater tops became illuminated.

A little to the north of Clavius, I could see what I believe to be Tycho. This gave the impression of great depth as the shadow it cast completely obscured the terrain to its west. A single bright peak could be seen against the dark floor.

By now I found I was looking less at individual features and more at how the lunar terrain changes from region to region, and the relative positions of features - the rest may read like a geography lesson

What almost appears to be a chain of craters leads north from Tycho to what I believe is the Mare Nubium. This is bordered to the east by the 'snowman' like grouping of craters Arzachel, Alphonsus and Ptolemaeus.

North of Ptolemaeus the terrain appeared much flatter, with the most obvious feature in the northern hemisphere being the Montes Appeninus. Punctuated by the crater Erastothenes at their western limit, this range arcs north and east towards Mare Serenitatis. I could make out three large craters to the north of the mountains, Aristarchus in the east and the smaller Aristillus and Autolycus to the west. I could see that the Appenines end near these craters and there is what I imagine to be a pass through the mountains before the mountains resume to the north as the Montes Caucases and Montes Alpes.

That was all there was time for really - there was a lot I didn;t look at, and next time I will try to have a better idea of what I can see beforehand. Still, I found it a very enjoyable hour, letting ones eye roam in a way that is not really possible with other heavenly bodies. Hopefully making these notes will help some of what I have learned this evening to stick

Thanks for reading, clear skies and a happy 2012.

[Anonymous]

Thank you for this post. Just last night with a 15-day-old Luna disrupting my usual diet of faint fuzzies, I turned my 10-inch reflector to our nearest neighbor and worked through a good number of features in this list:

Observing List | The Astronomical League

It's been about 10 years since I did any serious moon observing and I was completely hooked all over again.

I used two filters, a neutral density filter, plus either 80B, or yellow-green.

I think I'm going to pursue the Astronomical League lunar observing lists as a next project put put some structure around my observing time.

Clear skies--

Todd