There doesn't seem to be much talk about observing on this list lately. You'd think there was nothing up there to look at this time of month! :-)

Last night when I got home , I noticed that Jupiter was fairly high, hanging invitingly over the building across the street from where I live, so I dragged the 6" out into the driveway to take a look.

I had just finished putting together my new whizzy tube-cooling fan, and the tube had been sitting in the hot house and almost certainly needed to be cooled down, so I strapped the fan onto the back of the tube and plugged it in. It purred to life, ran for about a minute, then stopped. Oops, more debugging to do.

The moon was hovering in a nice niche between two sets of tree branches, and I figure there's plenty to see there even in the poor seeing we've been getting for the past several months, so I pointed in that direction. Two days short of full, the terminator was still well defined and there was plenty of interesting detail to be seen.

A crater I'd tried to identify last month bulged out from the terminator at the end of one of Tycho's rays. This month I did better with the charts; starting from Tycho and nearby Schickard, I identified the bulge as Bailley. When on the terminator, Bailly really stands out, and the two craters (A and B) inside it are easy to see. The floor of the main crater seems smoother near the outside edge, giving Bailly a "concentric ring" effect reminiscent of the concentric mountain ranges surrounding the Orientale basin.

Dark Schickard looks like a small mare, or like Grimaldi (for which I mistook it until I got my bearings straight). A fan of lighter material spreads out across the crater floor from a small crater (unnamed in Rukl) on the east end. Rukl shows this color contrast well.

Over at the north end of the terminator and on the limb, Pythagoras' central peak was throwing a nice shadow. The area just south of Pythagoras was full of little elevation changes which showed up nicely on the terminator, as a series of disconnected illuminated peaks floating above the surrounding darkness.

Back in away from the terminator, Aristarchus stood out, with Schroter's Valley right next to it. I hadn't seen Schroter's before; it's a very interesting feature, a horseshoe-shaped, sharp-edged canyon which seems to pass underground as it exits Herodotus, then emerges onto the surface and fans out as it makes its 180-degree bend.

By then I was getting tired and figured the tube had cooled down as much as it was going to, so I swung over to Jupiter. The seeing still wasn't great, but in the brief intervals of steady air there was still some detail to be seen. The North Equatorial Band has a narrow companion band just north of it, which I don't remember seeing last year when Jupiter disappeared from the night sky. There wasn't much swirling in the edges of the bands, compared to what I remember from last year, but there's a lot of fine color shading from the bands outward to the poles. I'm looking forward to nights of better seeing when I can get a really good look at the wealth of cloud detail on this planet.