by Akkana Peck
Last Saturday night, scanning around the moon with the Fremont Peak 30" telescope (I think we were stopped down to 10" by then) in between visitors at the public show, I stumbled across a lovely pair of craters with converging beams of light in them. Together, the craters made a figure "8", one crater larger than the other; the hair-thin ray in the smaller crater stretched toward the barely lit central peak of that crater.
I went to Rukl to identify the crater with the thin ray and the central peak ... and discovered that it was the crater Faye. I'd discovered the Faye Ray!
I looked around, but saw no sign of large angry gorillas, so I continued observing. As I watched off and on over the next 45 minutes or so, the beams grew longer, and the Faye Ray passed Faye's central peak at about 6:30UT.
Sketch is at http://www.shallowsky.com/images/sketch/faye.jpg
Technically speaking, these were not sunrise rays; since they were not perpendicular to the terminator (or parallel to each other), they must have been the tops of slanted ridges inside their respective craters. But except for that, they acted like rays, growing as the sun angle changed; they're well worth a look, if you're in that area during those lighting conditions.
There were also some very nice shadows and rays cast by the peaks in nearby Walter and la Caille.
