TAC'os,

I hope many of you were able to go out and observe the moon Tuesday night. The views were stunning! The air was very clear and steady in Oakland, where I set up my late 70's model Meade 6" f/8 reflector. I used the German mount from my SCT and the combo worked very well. I am not in any way a lunar observer, and have a hard time identifying what I'm seeing, but with a combination of a Phillip's Moon Map, and Rukl's "Atlas of the Moon", I did pretty well. I also discovered that a Newtonian scope makes it much easier to read these darn maps! I used a ton of eyepieces, but found I ended up with the orthos over the motly collection of plossl and wide fields that I have. I mostly used a 6mm ortho, even more than my 6mm Vixen Lanthenum, which gave 203x. At one point around 7:00 I used a 2x barlow and a 5mm ortho for 488x. It's amazing how well the 6 incher stood up to all that power! Luckily my dilithium crystals held out. :-) (Damn it Scotty, I need more power!)

The features I enjoyed the most were a set of craters which included Catharina, Cyrillus, and Theophilus. I was able to detect at least 4 peaks in Theophilus. So much detail there! Rukl says Theophilus is one of the most spectacular formations on the moon. Below Catharina is the Rupes Altai which has a drop of more than 1000 metres. This area was very sharp and contrasty. Also in the eyepiece field was Hypatia and the Rimae Hypatia.

The other area I focused on was the crater Plinius (Pliny the elder!) and the associated rilles. Two of the rilles were just ink black lines against a bright background. The wrinkle ridge Dorsa Smirnov (a Soviet naturalist,hmm I kinda figured the guy was into booze) was also prominent and had incredible detail.

Of course there was soooo much more to view; the rilles, ridges, landslides, rockfalls, craters, wrinkles, whew, it's amazing really. I've never seen so much detail on the moon. I own an 8 inch SCT with decent optics, but I've never been knocked out by the lunar views in it. I can understand now why the 6" f/8 reflector was the scope of choice for amateur astronomers for so many years.