lunarian

I've been reading Harold Hill's A Portfolio of Lunar Drawings.  I'm very impressed by it.  Hill spent his whole observing lifetime observing the moon and producing beautiful drawings of it, noting the changes to features at different light angles.  His persistence reminds me that amateur astronomy is, or can be, a lifetime pursuit: one can accumulate a valuable storehouse of knowledge and experience through dedication and leaving oneself open to wonder.  Hill himself admits he had no particular skill making drawings but through years of practice he gained excellent results.  He shows that the interesting and beautifully stark features of the moon are worth looking at -- something that is so contrary to the current prevailing taste for deep sky objects and dark sky viewing, when amateurs rarely observe but once a month during a dark sky expedition.  There is much one can record visually which cannot be captured by a camera or atlases.  There is much to see, and discover, from one's back yard.

And so I was out last night viewing the moon through the 12.5-inch.  It was quarter phase, 51% illuminated.  I pushed the magnification too high at 340x given the watery seeing, but I could discern plenty of fine detail nonetheless.  I was particularly taken with several details:

Montes Alpes: This feature was only half lit, and only the "entry ramp" of the Valis Alpes could be seen heading into the peaks.  Most of the peaks were dark but their summits were illuminated and bright white.  They gave the appearance of an open star cluster of a dozen peaks forming looping chains radiating out from the Valis.  There was a set of ridges spread out like a bird's foot from a common point near where the Valis met the darkness.

Unknown feature: I cannot find this on Rukl, so I will simply describe it: A pair of ridges, or perhaps opposing rims of a ruined crater, curved away from each other at tips like parenthesis ().  Each had central ridges which, with the outline of the base of the hills highlighted against the wide plain in which the feature lay, made it appear as rabbit ears.  Or a deer's hoof print.  

Unknown feature: The rubble of a rock slide spilling out, fan shaped, on the side of a crater wall.

Unknown feature: This was so distinctive I'm surprised and a little frustrated not to find it in Rukl.  Seven craters forming an angle -- four in a line, then about 110 degrees from it three more in a line -- like a compass spread open 110 degrees.  Each of them with nighttime darkness on their floors, but each of them with an illuminated central peak.  It was the oddest thing, to see the craters lined up and then each of them with the same appearance.  The furthest out in the line of three was pierced with depressions on either side, in line with the rest of the craters, as if a meteor had ploughed a grazing path through both walls of the crater.

I will keep searching my printed resources to see if I can identify what I saw.  I had merely made and "X" on a sketch of the finderscope view in my notes to refer me to the location for later -- certainly I will need to take more care to identify surrounding major features while at the eyepiece so I can find the little details later.