Seeing wasn't quite as good last night as it had been the previous couple of nights; I had to alternate my 6" between 171x and 133x.

The first thing that caught my eye was the huge crater complex near the northern end of the terminator, at a latitude about even with Aristarchus (where Schroter's Valley was still showing, but was not as sharply defined as it had been the previous two nights). A quick check of Rukl showed that this was Struve and Russell -- hey, the first thing David put on his list of cool things to check out. :-) The huge ghost crater Eddington was more obvious than I expected from Rukl's drawing.

Even farther north, even with Rumker, a small but deep crater in the western fringes of Procellarum caught my eye: Lavoisier A, with its much larger parent crater, Lavoisier, just barely showing on the terminator.

South of the Struve complex, Krafft and Cardanus were very easy to identify -- two prominent craters of similar size, out in Procellarum with nothing similar nearby. I looked for Catena Krafft, the crater chain connecting the two craters; I glimpsed hints of it, but wasn't able to get a really definite sighting. I couldn't see Rima Cardanus, either.

Much farther south, I explored the area around dark Grimaldi. A large crater -- Riccioli -- sat just inside the terminator, and adjacent to it, west of Hevlius (whose rilles were not visible at all) an interesting large crater looked like a high filled plateau, like a much larger version of Wargentin on the previous night, except not so dark: Hedin. Rukl (chart 28) shows a complicated series of striations or rilles on the flood of Hedin, though he doesn't comment on them in the text, but I couldn't see any of this. While I was in the neighborhood, I stopped by my "fish" from the previous night, Reiner Gamma, which still swam brightly in the Ocean of Storms, and to the little crater Galilaei, to pay homage to the man who got us started down this path of telescopic observing.

Back at Grimaldi, I noticed the small and very round "lake" of mare material a bit south: Cruger, which Rukl describes as a "crater with a very dark floor". (Gotta love those helpful descriptions. :-) Between Kruger and Grimaldi, I could see a less obvious patch of mare material, Lacus Aestatus. But that was still fairly far in from the terminator -- perhaps the ragged edge of the terminator was actually the Cordilleras, the outer ring of mountains of the Orientale complex? Though the libration this month isn't particularly favorable, I wanted to have a look anyway and figure out what I was seeing. I need practice in crater-hopping, anyway.

Hopping from Grimaldi through Lacus Aestatis through Cruger got me to Darwin and then to Byrgius. Byrgius turns out to be an excellent landmark in this area, because the large crater flanked by smaller craters Byrgius A and D is very easily recognizable. I then tried to make a triangle with Cruger and Byrgius in order to look for Eichstadt, the crater in the eastern foothills of the Cordilleras. But I was having no luck. There was a small mountain casting a nice shadow just west of Byrgius; but it was a bit too close to Byrgius to be the Cordilleras. Probably one of the walls of Lamarck D.

I brought out my moon globe, a very handy tool when navigating on the limb, and checked the angles, and decided that another route might work better. So I tried to make a straight line from Cruger, through Darwin B, to Eichstadt, but still I didn't see any obvious crater. Perhaps it was just too early to see Eichstadt. So I couldn't convince myself that I was seeing that part of the Cordilleras yet.

I suspect that part of the Cordilleras just wasn't lit yet. But heading north back to Lacus Aestatis, I crater-hopped through Rocca and compared the distances, and the mountains just on the terminator there probably were the northern part of the Cordilleras. I looked for Lacus Autumni, on the other side of those mountains, but it wasn't visible yet. I'll have to try tonight, except that it doesn't look like the weather's going to cooperate; in fact, I'm going outside now to put the top on my car before it gets rained on. Perhaps someone in a sunnier clime can look for Lacus Autumni for me ...