Lunar X - 3rd Feb 2017

[Peter Drew]

38 minutes ago, mikeDnight said:

Could this be Mike from Monsters Inc?

More likely the lunar "Diamond Ring". 

 

 

[orion25]

On 1/31/2017 at 17:37, DRT said:

I've just been reading this month's S@N magazine and found an article about the "Lunar X" that will appear on Friday evening from 18:00 to 23:00.

I've never heard of it but it sounds like fun to try to spot it so I thought it worth giving a heads-up here.

There is an explanation of it here.

Thanks for the heads up, Derek. I never tried to spot it before. I found it and Lunar V relatively easily with a moon map to guide me. I did a quick image of the first quarter at prime focus using my Nikon camera and 127mm Maksutov (a single sub at 1/320s) and identified the lunar alphabets:

This was fun!

Clear skies,

Reggie

[Nyctimene]

Thanks to the heads-up here I managed to follow the forming of the Lunar X Friday evening from 19.30 to 21.15 CET with my 80/400 Vixen FH frac and the Seben 24-8 zoom, for higher mags a Baader 2,25 Barlow added. NELM about 4 mag, moderate seeing some clouds.

At first look 19.30, starting from Aliacensius over Werner to the suspected area, nothing could be seen.  At 20.15 a tiny spot of light emerged in the region of the "left - lower" (South-West) arm of the cross, which rapidly, in about 12 minutes, grew to the full  arm's length.  At 20.20, the "left -upper" (North-West) arm developed, and at  about 20.35 both arms stood out as a  bright "V", pointed to the terminator, but well separated from this by darkness. The development of the two missing arms appeared to be slower, showing at first several tiny bright spots at the crater's crests, which slowly melted together, until at about 21.15 all four arms of the cross had formed. The "X" could easily be seen at V=50x, down to 25x, and even the "Blue Penguin" (Infinity  76/300 N) showed it. The Lunar "V" could be seen at the same time and was quite conspicuous.

So another nice illumination phenomenon, which I had heard of before, but never observed,  seen now - thanks, SGL!

Stephan