[DougAdams]

24th September 2007 – Lunar Session (11:30pm – 12:15am)
Seeing 2
Transparency 2
4" Refractor, 3-6mm Zoom

A promising night was in store as I was walking home from the station. Clear and the seeing looked quite steady. When I finally got around to setting up the scope, I saw with disgust the clouds had rolled in. They were rapidly scudding across the Moon, but I set up anyway – a natural Moon filter.

The Moon is 13.5 days old, so I ripped the appropriate Lunar Terminator chart out of the folder, grabbed the 3-6mm Zoom eyepiece, and spent 45 minutes studying a few features.

Aristarchus/Herodotus – a nice pair of craters, several hours past dawn. The “sunrise” side of Aristarchus showed some terrace detail, although it was very bright. Herodotus looked much darker in comparison – is it older? Schroeter’s Valley was very easy to pick out – looking like a “V” snaking away from the pair of craters before intersecting and winding away. I think the main valley actually runs towards Herodotus, and the other limb of the “V” is a separate rille or ridge – not sure.

Mt Ruemker – saw this strange, unidentified feature just past the terminator. The chart tells me it’s Mt Ruemker. It appears that someone has flung a pancake on the lunar surface and left it there – a flat, rounded feature with several wrinkles on it’s surface.

Tycho – tons of details in the inside walls. The central peak was very bright, and I could see a tiny peak adjacent to it. My eye kept getting drawn to a strange, almost triangular crater just to the south of Tycho towards Longomontanus. I tried to identify this later with Rukl, but I’m not sure what it was. There doesn’t appear to be any triangular craters nearby, so perhaps it was a lighting effect.

Mt Pico – very bright, just south of Plato.

Plato – I spent about 20 minutes observing Plato at various magnifications. For the first time the zoom eyepiece supported the 3mm setting, although the floaters were a pain. The best trade-off between magnification and resolution was at 4mm (130x). I could see 3 craterlets the entire time as white specks – the central A and C/D pair craterlets (although it was difficult to split the pair). Twice I spotted the B craterlet, but it was fleeting.

Around 12:15am the clouds had thickened to the point where it was tricky spotting fine detail, so I packed up.