I looked out the window after dinner last night and saw, much to my surprise, an unfamiliar, huge glowing orb low in the south. First clear night this lunation! So I grabbed the VX102 and lugged it out to the driveway.

I was a bit reluctant at first -- I'm sick of full moons: for the last 5 months or so, the clearest part of the month has been within a few days of full, so it's the only phase I ever get to see these days. But when I took a look at the Orientale area, I changed my mind. This is a very good libration, and a good chance to get a look at one of the most interesting features on the far side of the moon. Tuesday night may be even better.

Draw a line from Copernicus through Grimaldi to the limb, and the double ring of the Cordillera and Rook mountains surrounding the Orientale basin were immediately obvious.

Using the craters along the edges of the Cordilleras -- Schluter to the north, Eichstadt farther south -- I tried to determine how far west I was seeing. I could definitely see Lacus Autumni, which lies between the Cordilleras and the Rooks, and bits of Lacus Veris peeking out through a low pass in the Rooks. Still farther south, I looked for Nicholson and Pettit (along the crest of the Rooks) but couldn't see them -- the terminator hadn't progressed that far yet. (If my code on the Hitchhiker's Guide is correct, Pettit should be seeing sunrise right about now, midday on Tuesday.)

The terminator was about at the crest of the Rooks, and it looked like there was a lot of limb left, so I have hope (if the sky stays clear) of getting a look into the Orientale Basin tonight. I also plan to see if I can see the rest of Lacus Veris, Wright and Shaler and the nearby Vallis Bouvard, Focas, and especially the craters Kopff, Maunder, and Hohmann inside central Mare Orientale.

Then I did some comparison testing. The seeing wasn't too bad, and I've been dying for a chance to compare my new VX102 to my old Cave 6" f/8, so I rolled the Cave out. Eyepieces were a 6.6mm Orthostar, a 7.5mm Takahashi LE, and a 9mm Vixen Lanthanum.

The results were pretty much as expected. On rilles -- Rimae Darwin and Rima Sirsalis -- the Cave blew the refractor away. Rimae Darwin and the beginning of Sirsalis were easily visible in the Cave with any eyepiece (best in the 7.5mm, 160x), whereas in the 102, I could catch an occasional glimpse of Rimae Darwin in the 7.5 and 9, and only once caught a fleeting glimpse of the very beginning of Sirsalis in the 9mm (111x); the 6.6mm (151x) was pushing the 102 too hard in the available seeing. The reflector also gave a steadier view of edge details like the positions of craters and mountain ranges, at a wider range of magnifications, so it was somewhat easier to use for navigation around the Orientale shock rings (though I did most of my navigation with the refractor anyway because I happened to set it up closer to the garage where I had the atlas set up on the car's roof. :-)

On low-contrast details, like the lovely subtle pattern of Riccioli D in the floor of Riccioli, the refractor held its own and kept up with the reflector.

I wanted to make a sketch, but I had spent so much time navigating and comparison testing that I used up my allotment of clear sky; the clouds came in at about 11:45 and didn't look like they were likely to leave any time soon, so I packed up.