by Akkana Peck
A member of a local club, the Peninsula Astronomical Society, sent out an alert that Saturday night was a good night for observers here on the west coast of the US to look at the Jura Mountain loop, where the top of the mountain range flanking Sinus Iridum peeks out of the blackness into the sunlight, creating an arc of light just past the terminator.
I took my new homebuilt 8" dob to the PAS star party, where we saw a gradual transition from a partial loop to the full loop of the Juras. The sky was hazy and a bit unsteady, but we didn't have any real clouds and were able to get good lunar views of the Juras as well as the dome fields and secondary craters around Copernicus.
I took a few images: first, by holding up my C2020 to a Vixen zoom eyepiece in my dob, which worked surprisingly well at low power (not so well at higher mags) -- the best image is at http://www.transbay.net/~akkana/images/jura-8dob.jpg Ginger is right -- it's definitely worth holding a camera (especially a digital, since you can see the results immediately) up to an eyepiece to see what you'll get!
Later, William Phelps graciously let me borrow his camera adaptor, and the big refractor attached to it :-), for some much sharper high-power images: the best is http://www.transbay.net/~akkana/images/jura-wm7.jpg (that's a big image, but there's a small thumbnail at http://www.transbay.net/~akkana/images/jura-wm7T.jpg).
Several people were taking pictures, at slightly different times, and I'm hoping we might be able to combine them to get a sequence showing the changing light as the sun rose.
We also got a memorable view of Venus setting over the mountains ("what's that really bright light on top of the hill there?") -- it took a long time to disappear! I'm going to have to remember to watch for Venus-sets in the future.
