| Observing Location | TotL |
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| Observational Period | 2015-0215 EST |
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| Atmospheric Conditions |
| Cloud Cover | Scattered Clouds |
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| Temperature | 30s F |
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| Wind | Calm
gusting to
Moderate Breeze |
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| Humidity | Moderate |
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| Feels Like | Raw |
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There were streams of clouds coming in from the west low on the horizon all night. At the end of the night the Moon had a white ring around it but still looked good in the scope. The seeing would periodically go soft for several seconds at a time. I was dressed warmly but could have used another later all the way around.
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| Instruments | SAR: Coulter CT-100 Newtonian reflector - Charlie
- Celestron Omni 20mm
- Celestron Omni 2x Barlow
Teleport 10" Donsonisn reflector - Peter
Celestron 7x50 binocular - Kin
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| Observing Party | Charlie Ridgway
Peter Tagatac
Kin Lee
Time's Up Midnight Ride (all two of them)
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I don't remember a whole lot of what I looked at. In SAR I looked at the Moon, the Pleiades, the Beehive, Saturn, M42
In Peters Scope we saw some double stars, some galaxies and Saturn.
| Target | Moon |
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| Constellation | Tau |
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| Category | Lunar |
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Time
yyyymmdd.hhmm | 20061230.2030 EST |
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| Comments |
| Lunation | 1039 |
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| Phase | Waxing Gibbous |
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| Age | 10d11h28m |
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| Elongation | 134.84° |
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| % Illuminated | 85.3% |
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| Magnitude | -11.7 |
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| Altitude | 72.3° |
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Tonight Tycho looked like it was sitting on a triangular island with a few craters in it (the island). The ocean around the island was sculpted by waves of craters.
Gassendi was tangent to the terminator. It is nicely proportioned to beet round Mare Humorum and the two look like a pair of interlocking watch hears.
Peter said that Lepler should be a small crater on the terminator near Copernicus. I found two craters there that fit that bill, one right on the terminator and the other some distance into the morning sunlight. When he added that it would br surrounded by a heat ring it was easy to spot it as the ejecta blanket was visible in this light.
That reminds me of a short discussion we had last night about crater formation. Peter says that the formation theory says that the surface material ekcted from a crater will go farthest from the impact site because the impactor is dissipating the most energy at that time. As the impactor burrows down its energy has being dissipated and subsequent material can't be thrown as far from the forming crater. So the resulting ejecta blanket will have deep material closest to the crater wall and surface material farthest away. I think that is probably a simplified theory as it does not take into account possible density differences in the material being ejected. If the surface material was denser than the material beneath it it might not be thrown as far as less dense material beneath it. And taking the terrestrial impactor model that has dust from the impact becoming airborne and circling the earth on the winds: how would this translate to a lunar environment? Since there is a lesser gravity on the Moon it seems that material ejected into the less dense lunar atmosphere could remain suspended there for a much longer period of time and would not br spread around the entire Moon since it rotates very slowly and the only wind to disturb the plume would be the solar wind. How much lunar material would receive enough energy to reach escape velocity and where would it go after it escaped the Moon. Now I want to do some reading on lunar cratering theory.
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