Getting Mooned

SOMEBODY clearly needs to work out how to make the automated posting feature in Blogger work properly.  This should have gone up on Thursday.

....All photos in this post were taken by the author using a Canon PowerShot A630, sometimes through an 8" Celestron Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope.  The camera is held up to the telescope by an Orion SteadyPix Deluxe. 

.....If you have been outside in the evenings, you will have noticed that the Moon is getting bigger and brighter each night, heading to a full Moon tomorrow.  I have to confess that I've been (perhaps unfairly) biased against the Moon.  From the time that I started getting interested in astronomy, I have been searching in the sky for new objects that I haven't seen before, trying to find the faintest thing that I could find.  The Moon was therefore my enemy.


.....Furthermore, I could never find the "Man in the Moon".  Do you see it below?  I don't.

.....I do, however, see the rabbit.  The idea of the rabbit in the moon appears in a number of Asian legends, but I think that I'm remembering a story where the rabbit is thrown there.  Watership Down? Anyway, if you don't see it, here it is:

.....Zooming in:

.....See?  The rabbit even has a carrot.  This hatred of the Moon eased when my wife got me an attachment for my telescope allowing the camera to stay still long enough to take images through the telescope.  Here is a image of the waxing crescent Moon.

.....Photography actually is helping me enjoy observing the Moon.  One of my problems has been that it has been hard for me to adjust to most of the available maps of the Moon.  Why this is, I'm not sure.  Telescopes will invert the images as we see them. (In most cases, who cares, as there is no "up" in space - except on the Moon.)  Antonin Rükl's Atlas of the Moon was much easier to use for me (it seems that there is a revised edition - I wonder what changed), so I was able to map images to place names.  This means thta I can learn more about specific places, and then go back later and find them again!  Let's start with some of the Maria (singular: Mare), dark areas on the Moon produced from three to three and a half billion years ago when massive impactors hit the Moon hard enough to break through the surface and cause some of the still-molten interior of the Moon to boil up and re-surface the area.  Maria typically have few craters, since they were formed after most big things that were going to hit other big things already had.  (It is not a thing that could be done twice, after all.)  These features are named as if they were bodies of water because they appeared flat and featureless to early telescopic observers.

.....Let's start by looking at some of the Maria best visible during the first half of the month, and as the blog goes on, I will return to the Moon when I can to look at more features, and learn more about the ones we can identify.  The photo below has labeled areas including Mare Humboldtianum (Humboldt's Sea, named after an explorer because it lies on the border of the part of the Moon that we can see, and the part of the Moon that we can't see, always on the edge of the unknown), Mare Crisium (The Sea of Crisis), Mare Frigoris (The Sea of Cold), Lacus Somniorum (The Lake of Dreams), Mare Tranquitalis (The Sea of Tranquility), Mare Fecunditatis (the Sea of Fertility), and Mare Serenitatis (the Sea of Serenity)

.....For instance, that footprint, Mare Undorum (the Sea of Waves) and Mare Spumans (the Foaming Sea) - what's up with that?