The moon rose about an hour before sunset tonight, and everyone on the street watched it, low in the east, north of the tower instead of south. Eric enjoys pointing the moon out whenever he sees it in the day. Many people do, for that matter. I always do. This evening our neighbor commented on what a lovely sight it made, hanging there in the almost cloudless sky.
Seeing how clear the sky was, I had high hopes of a decent shot tonight. So I started setting up at about 7 p.m., hauling my heavy tripod and scope out back. The tripod is built to accommodate my 8-inch telescope, but I wanted it just for its piggybacking tonight, to make a nice stable mount for my little digiscope rig. After all, last month’s picture was blurry, so I’ve abandoned the Telepod for imaging purposes. Having taken care of the heavy lifting, I went back inside for the night-time ritual of stories, snacks, and crib. For the boy, not for me.
That mission accomplished, I started reading a book to pass the time waiting for the moon to rise high enough above the horizon that I’d be able to get a shot unruffled by the unsteady air down low. After all, the sky looked pretty good tonight. I could afford to wait.
And then I heard the a sound that brought my heart into my throat: the gentle pitter patter of rain drumming on the roof. A passing shower, but nonetheless, the thought of water on my equipment had me racing outside to haul my gear in before it could get ruined. I was quick, but not quick enough to get everything indoors while it was still dry; I had to spend some time wiping down the exposed surfaces, thanking my lucky stars that it hadn’t been a downpour. No serious harm done, but scary nonetheless. I almost couldn’t believe that the weather had changed so abruptly, but then I remembered that I’m in Florida. ’nuff said.
After about an hour, the clouds moved on, and I did manage to get a few decent pictures of tonight’s Beaver moon (according to the Colonial American naming scheme; in the English scheme it’s the Hunter’s moon, which was last month’s moon to us):
This is the first time this year that I can recall the moon’s libration showing us both the southern and western limbs to advantage; about 5.5°S and 4°W. If you’ll look at the eastern limb (to the right), you’ll notice that Mare Crisium is pretty close to the edge; compare that to how it looked in, say, April, when the libration was strongly N (7°) and E (5°):
In April you could see a lot more moon between Mare Crisium and the edge; tonight, you can almost imagine a tilt of the moon so severe that the edge of the sea would be around the other side. But that’s illusion; there’s a LOT of territory between the edge of MC and the visible limb of the moon. It’s foreshortened, but remember that it takes almost two days into the lunation before you can start to see MC, and it isn’t plainly visible in its entirety until day 3; similarly, it takes a couple of days past full moon until the dark edge (the terminator) sweeps across it from the east (it usually starts around the 17th day of the lunation and disappears on day 18 or 19, depending on libration).
I’ll see if I can get another shot tomorrow night, to compare the view 14 hours before full moon and that 10 or so hours after (full moon is at 12:28 p.m. tomorrow). Even so, there’s only one full moon left in 2010 (that will be the Christmas moon, scheduled for 12/21—one day after the December solstice this year).
As usual, here’s the gallery; it now contains 12 images, since I started with the first full moon of December 2009, instead of waiting for the second one (and it’s a good thing, since that’s the one I missed!):
December 1, 2009 Full moon
