From my house in the hills west of Redwood City between the trees and rooftops to my east I can see a little piece of the Bay, the Dumbarton Bridge and the East Bay cities beyond.

This evening the Moon rose in exactly the right spot. As it crossed the horizon I could see its misshapen form from my front porch. Then as it rose a little further I saw its reflection in the Bay. The water was so still that the reflected image was so clear I could distinguish the highlands and maria! For a while the reflection was "behind" the bridge making a very pretty silhouette.

Our not so pristine atmosphere turned it a rusty golden color. Then as the Moon rose further its reflection came toward me across the bay and finally disappeared into the shores of Palo Alto. Tres Kewl.

And then around midnight the seeing got good.

The famous chain of four big craters on the Moon's eastern limb (Langrenus, Vendelinus, Petavius, and Furnerius) were very nice. The rimae in Petavius were better than I had seen before; the main one dead obvious, of course, but I could also see the smaller extensions of it on the north side that run nearly perpendicular to the main rima. Rima Furnerius was obvious, too. It gave the appearance of running up thru the crater wall almost out to the surrounding highland. All these things were more clearly defined in my eyepiece(s) than in Rukl's Atlas.

"Vallis North" was also evident. I hope Dave was out observing, too :-)

The transparency was Horrible with high clouds and a nearly full Moon. Even easy open clusters would have been ugly. But the Moon burns thru stuff like this easily. In fact, it seems that these conditions often lead to pretty good seeing sometimes. It's nice to be able to take advantage of it.