The moon's upside down!

[The Warthog]

I took my refractor outside last night, as the night was cloudless for the first time in a long time. The sky was not particularly transparent, however, and I could see only a handfull of the brightest stars. I pointed the scope at the moon, and tried a couple of different filters, and some other eyepieces. The orange filter seems to give the best detail on the almost-full moon. It was about -1 outside, and hardly windy at all. The weather report said 14km winds, but my yard is fairly sheltered, so the smoke from my Cuban cigar just wafted lazily away on the breeze. I took the opportunity to re-time the passage of objects across the FOV of my new Russian Erfle ep, and decided that it has a AFOV of 55 degrees. Not bad, and it has almost edge-to-edge sharpness, making it a nice mate for my X-Cels. My 5mm X-Cel does a nice job, but is a little hard to focus, and at 200x the slightest tremor shows up in the view.

I went around looking for some old familiar sights, and had a little trouble at first. I tentatively identified Tycho, then realized that the surrounding area wasn't right, so I gave it a think, and looked down the disc for Tycho, finding it at the bottom of the moon's disc. Of course, I haven't looked at the moon through a refractor with the diagonal in place before, so all the landmarks are upside-down to me. Even had a little trouble identifying Sinus Iridium, but got the hang of it after a while. It was a dry cold, so I had no problem with dewing or icing, as I had in the last week or so.

Finally went back in, but left the scope set up to have a go at Saturn later.

[The Warthog]

Er, sorry, meant to put this under 'observations.' Could one of the Mods move it, please?

[Kaptain Klevtsov]

I'll say it's a good report in the wrong place. When it gets to be in the right place it'll be even better, thanks WH. Always enjoy your reports.

Captain Chaos

[geppetto]

Yes, nice report WH

Can smell the Cuban cigar from here 8)