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I'm not interested in the Moon. Never have been. It is a nuisance. It's too bright. Interferes with my pursuit of Messiers, fine NGCs, comets, and meteors. When the Moon is up, I limit my observations to double stars. If I even bother to go out...
The Moon defines my summer. I’m off to the Blue Mountains for new Moon weekends. When full, I book in all my other hobbies. About the only time I enjoy the bright Moon is while camping or sans flashlight when I need to make the late-night trip to the loo.
When I learned that the Moon is a required target on the Explore The Universe Certificate, I was perturbed. You have to spot twelve features on the lunar surface for crying out loud. Twelve items. Find, observe, and log! Twelve! Crikey!
I know some people are fascinated by our nearest neighbour. Studying it, sketching, chasing X's and Straight Walls with their low power 'scopes, wide field eyepieces, and neutral density filters. These lunar lovers have all the good guides. It seems Antonin Rükl is The Man. I have no books on the Moon. I have not read the Moon chapter in my astronomy tomes.
I only observe the Moon when civilians are around. During star parties I like to show the remarkable similarity to Swiss cheese! As usual, for the August 2009 City Observing Session at High Park, I initially targeted the only object visible in the darkening sky.
A bit bored perhaps, nothing else to do, no one else around, I pulled my 2009 RASC Observer's Handbook and flipped to page 152. But between scattered clouds, mozzies, the influx of other RASCals, and the Schmidt-Cassegrain's mirror-reversed orientation, I was getting confused. Still I grew increasingly intrigued by the small dark region on the right (lit) side of the lunar surface. The shape reminded me a little bit of a house, the classic pictogram shape, pentagon with flat sides and bottom with gabled roof. Or the spade on a deck of cards. Determined to correlate what I was seeing in the eyepiece to what the Handbook showed, I realised that if I could stand above my telescope, I could eliminate the field rotation. Atop my large 3 step stool, eyepiece pointing up, I found the view as expected: the illuminated portion of the crescent was to the bottom left. And while still a challenge, now knowing where north and east were, I was able to mentally flip the diagram from the book. Ah ha. It is Mare Crisium I am looking at.
I notice tiny little craters on the smooth maria. I learned one was Picard. Some of the small craters along the terminator near the north pole caught my eye: Atlas and Hercules! The black shadows told of their depth. Mr Zackon asked if the large crater above Crisium, just above the equator, was Copernicus. I said I thought it was Langrenus. John Bohdanowicz agreed. But I remarked it was like Copernicus, with the peak uplift in the centre. It seemed to be about the same size. John reminded us that Copernicus was on the opposite side, the west side. My recollection was that it was also closer to the meridian. I returned to Crisium and then was able to identify Macrobius. And then I lost myself in the heavily cratered region near the south pole, marvelling at the density of craters, how they overlapped one another, the variety of forms and depths, the interplay of sunlight and shadow along the terminator.
Later that evening, as usual, I consolidated my field notes, reviewed what I saw, and tried to recreate what I had seen in software. Stellarium, my very old version of RedShift, and TheSky6 all did not show satisfying views of the Moon.
Online, I stumbled across the Lunar Republic web site at
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