It was a beautiful moon night -- not only was it clear, but the seeing was better than I've seen it in many months. What a deal!

Paul Sterngold wrote:
> The most notable observations were, first, an interesting dark streak
> running e-w directly to the north of Plinius.  I would have guessed
> that it was a shadow, except for its direction, and the lack of
> anything that seemed to be casting it.  Was it a shadow, or ejecta, or
> a lava flow?

I saw that, too, but to me it looked like a shadow off a wrinkle ridge rather than an albedo feature.

The coolest thing I saw last night was the Hypatia ray: I was looking for Rimae Hypatia (which turned out to be quite easy) and discovered that Hypatia has a break in its eastern wall, and the timing was just right (at about 8pm) for a thin ray to spill through this wall and all the way across the crater floor to the opposite wall. It was the best lunar ray I've seen so far. Not only that, but just south of where the ray hits the opposite (western) wall of the crater, there's another break, causing a second ray to spill out of the crater onto the terrain west of Hypatia. Lovely!

I saw all kinds of other neat stuff last night which I haven't had time yet to write up properly, including the rings around Mare Nectaris (the Altai Scarp and the walls of Theophilus/Cyrilius/Catharina make a double ring of mountains just like the double ring around Orientale -- this is the best chance we earthbound observers get to see "live" something like what Orientale might look like face-on), Rimae Plinius (lying across the end of Dorsa Smirnov like the cracks across the Mid-Atlantic Ridge here on earth), some lovely domes (Arago alpha and particularly beta) south of Plinius, Posidonius and the rilles inside it, both Jansen and Janssen and the rilles associated with each, a double crater that looked like a deer hoofprint near Janssen (labelled HB and H on p. 67 of Rukl), and Burg and its Rimae smack in the middle of Lacus Mortis (unusually wide, more like a canyon than a rille).

It was a lovely night to be lunie!