Oh my goodness! The Moon's been stolen!

[The Warthog]

As it appears we are going to have a relatively cloudless evening, I went and set up my tripod, then went to look for the moon, and couldn't see it anywhere! There's only a patch of cloud, covering a few acres to the west, but otherwise nothing. Can't see Venus, either. I'll have to ask God to put them back, or there'll be trouble!

[brianb]

There's only a patch of cloud,

There's your problem. It only takes a small patch, and the clouds are very careful to place themselves in exactly the right (wrong!) spot ... they're also motorized, I'm sure of that because they can maintain position despite the prevailing wind.

[The Warthog]

Sure enough, God put the Moon back, and Venus. I got Venus in the scope, but it was a blurry disk in the sunset glow, so after a minute or two I put the scope in the Moon. About all I could see was that Mare Crisium was fully in sunlight, but the view didn't appear very satisfactory. I came inside to let it darken up a bit, then went back and tried again. I wasn't able to come to a decent focus with any combination of ep and Barlow, so I stepped back a moment and then took another look. I realized then that the limb of the Moon was waving like a flag in a force 9 gale. That was good because I was blaming everything from my eyes to the scope. Problem really was the seeing, so I gave up and came inside to watch The Mentalist.