| Reports | TAC | Join mailing list |
Had some time to look at the Moon tonight. It wasn't entirely dark at 2030, but that's ok because the Moon is really bright. Anyway, used the 10" DOB at high power. Spent the entire session at 104x and about 20 minutes at 312x looking at the Straight Wall.
Being that I am using a DOB with no tracking, I played a fun game. I pretended I was the Apollo astronauts zooming over top the Lunar surface! Its easy to get that illusion by simply positioning the Moon at the top of the field and simply let the earth's rotation let the image drift south eastward. I could change the speed of my spacecraft's orbit by simply increasing or decreasing my eyepiece magnification, thereby changing the field of view and my apparent speed over the surface. Anyway, I made several orbits in my spacecraft. Its fun...Try it some time!
The Straight Wall was my primary goal. I had seen it last month at near full and got a positive identification on it, but its beauty isn't really apparent without some good shadows. So tonight, there was really good shadows.
To put things in perspective, the Moon was at 1st quarter and the terminator was west of the center longitude line. The Straight Wall cast its shadow to the west also. It stood out sortta like a piece of hair that had gotten on the eyepiece - its a small black line about the width of a hair. What was interesting was to see the craters that seem to be at each end of the Wall. Those became really visible at 312X. How in the world astronomers have measured the Wall's height is beyond me at this point. They say its 120 km long, which shouldn't be too hard to figure out, but to measure its height (800 feet) off the surface is a mystery to me.
Anyway, scanned the rest of the surface. The mountain range between Vaporium and Imbrium looked really nice, again because of the long shadows. Mare Crisium was fully lit and well defined. Craters Bullialdus, Eratosthenes and Archimedes were all nice images to name a few. I hunted for Tycho but wasn't sure I found it - I still lack good Moon charts. There was plenty of visual excitement to the Southwest due to the exceptional shadows.
Before cutting my session short (have to go to work in the morning) I took a quick look at Mars using 312x. As it slipped through the field of view, I could make out surface markings and the hint of polar cap. So the seeing was better tonight than my past attempts trying to see the polar cap.
Well gotta go get sleep.