Hi all
With the moon a day shy of first quarter, it was hanging in the southern sky and I observed with the 120mm f/8 stepped down to 100mm f/10.
I mentioned elsewhere about the white spot in the shadow draped wall of Aristoteles. The shadows of this same crater wall were draped over the crater floor in a sawtooth pattern that reminded me of the character Jaws from the James Bond movies. The shape of the shadows gives some indication of the topography of the top of a crater wall, though slightly exaggerated due to low angle of the sun.
Looking at the Mare Serentatis, the wrinkle ridges that are so prominent as they lay scattered about the sea give the mare a wrinkly old leathery skin look, complete with warts from the domes that stretch away towards the north.
North of Julius Caesar, there is a tear in the surface of the moon. It is spindle shaped, approximately halfway along the length there are a couple of circular "nibbles" taken out of the edges. I wonder if there were a couple of craters sitting along the fault and when the chasm appeared, it split these craters in two. It looks deep and runs from the Mare Serentatis towards a dark crater north of Julius Caesar, stopping just before the crater. It give the appearance of an exclamation point lying on its side.
There is a lunar resident sitting in the dark heart of the crater Maurolycus and shining a very powerful torch into the night sky.
The irregular shaped, Clairault, south of Maurolycus, has a bulbous shaped object jutting into Maurolycus from the south-west. It looks like a platform with a circular section at the end, maybe it is a lunar catwalk for a lunar fashion show? It was pure white when I first observed it, with the rising of the sun the overall even colour changed, revealing that it was not a flat surface, but undulating as shadows began to appear and separated both ends.
The Apollo 16 landing site is a really flat region surrounded by fields of craters. It lies between Descartes, Zollner, Taylor and Lindsay. The area appears almost flat, using high magnification, it is possible to see some small raised areas.
Then the clouds came in.
Paul
Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better programs, and the universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning.
Rich Cook
