Friday night/Saturday morning, I decided to put my 2 a.m. wakeup call* to good use and get a shot of the moon at close to full. Backyard astronomy at its best!
The house is nice and cool these days, thanks to the a/c man and my suddenly light bank account, and the contrast between the cool and dry indoors and the hot and muggy out of doors was intense, even at 2:25 a.m. I thought I’d entered a sauna just by opening the door to the Florida room! There was a deep mist in the air, but not too dense; a few stars were visible overhead. And, playing peekaboo with some higher fluffier clouds, so too was the moon, just five hours before full:
Here’s the technical data from the caption (which you can see if you mouse over the blank area to the right of the image, or if you read the text below):
Moon 5 hours before full, June 26, 2010, 2:28 a.m. EDT. 100% illuminated. Moon age 13d, 19h, 12m.
I’m quite pleased to have gotten any shot of the moon at all, given the cloudy conditions.
The libration was about 5 degrees east (nearly maximal), and 6 degrees north (again, fairly high, but not maximal). You can see about as far around the eastern limb as possible; you can see both the Mare Marginis and Mare Symthii poking their heads around the side:
Again, you can mouse over the white space, or you can read the caption below:
Maria Marginis and Smythii peeking around the eastern limb near maximal elongation, June 26, 2010, 2:28 a.m. EDT.
Or, you can just enjoy the fuzzy pictures. If you want to know the names of the other maria in the picture, they are, from clockwise, Crisium (top center), Undarum (the little teeny patch of darkness just below and right of Crisium), Fecunditatis (with the bright smudge of the crater Langrenus at the right (eastern) side), and Tranquillitatis.
Here’s the gallery of all the full moons in this sequence; only the first full moon of the astronomical year (Winter 2010, which happened in December 2009) is missing. (For the explanation of how the second full moon in the month of December 2009 is actually part of the Winter 2010 moon sequence, and is NOT a blue moon, try this post.)
*Yes, Eric is still waking up at 2 a.m. to enjoy his nightly appetite-destroying bottle.
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