Rupes Recta and (later) Davy Crater Chain

[Peter_D]

I'm relatively new to lunar observing - this evening was particularly satisfying.

I have limited observing time so tonight I concentrated on Rupes Recta. Seeing is currently excellent and I was able to discern some of the neighbouring craterlets (e.g. Thebit 'B') with my Celestron 6SE. One rectangular feature relatively close by intrigued me. I took an image of it with my smartphone and when I went in, I identified it as Davy Y (centre of second photo). I looked in my old Times Moon Atlas and saw it contained a fantastic chain of craters. Well I was straight out the door again and reset-up my gear! And sure enough, I spotted the line of craters with a 5mm Vixen LV eyepiece (x300 mag). Like I said, a really satisfying session!

 

Edited April 1, 2020 by Peter_D

[Stu]

Nice report of a clearly successful session Peter! The Moon has been looking fabulous since becoming visible this cycle; I have been enjoying it too although tonight was clouded out so I missed being able to have a check out of these features. Thanks for the images 👍👍

[mikeDnight]

Beautiful! 

I really love these high power images as they make my heart skip a beat. There's some great detail in the 300X shot. Thanks for posting them.

Edited April 1, 2020 by mikeDnight

[Peter_D]

8 hours ago, mikeDnight said:

Beautiful! 

I really love these high power images as they make my heart skip a beat. There's some great detail in the 300X shot. Thanks for posting them.

Hi Mike,

Thanks!

 The image of Rupes Recta is with quite a bit of digital zoom added - I've added the unzoomed one (x300) for reference. The Thebit craterlets were visible at the eyepiece for me too, without the smartphone - it shows how good the seeing was.

Rgds

Peter

Edited April 2, 2020 by Peter_D

[mikeDnight]

Superb! The eyepiece view is always sharper than an image, but even so, I can see a wealth of detail in that image softness that I'd imagine would have appeared laser etched in the eyepiece. 

Incidentally, the crater in the bottom right of your image 'Werner', is one of my personal favourites. There are a number of fine rilles within Werner that reveal themselves in a sharp scope, but that hardly ever get even hinted at in images. And don't try finding any reference to them in atlases or books. It would be a worthy project for anyone to try and catch these rilles in an image, yet visually I find them quite an obvious feature, even when Werner is at some distance from the terminator. 

[Peter_D]

They are fantastic sketches, thanks for sharing!