Moon 28 January 2002

• The moon is not quite full yet.
• The west side is in shadow.
• In the southern highlands, Tycho crater has splattered magnificent rays over the rest of the surface.
• Since the moon was photographed from New Zealand: 
       South is to the top, west to the right and east is left. 
• The "rabbit" ears are pointing up, as they should for an alert bunny, sitting in the East.
• East is where the sun rises first on the moon. It is easy to get confused since 
       Lunar East lies towards Earth's West...    
            Oh well, don't worry about it!
• Lunar North and South point to Earth's North and South - at least that makes sense.
• The moon only lines up with South vertically above North when on the meridian
       (at its highest point in the sky, and even then it is not precise).
• Here the moon is tilted a little to the right (before meridian passage; "AM", if it were the sun).
• The moon arches over the Northern Sky during the night in New Zealand.
       Observant Northern visitors get confused, because in their Hemisphere Sun and Moon are South.
  

• This orientation is what Southern Hemisphere people see when looking at the moon in binoculars.

• Northern Hemisphere people see the moon this way when looking through an astronomical telescope, which inverts everything.

• So when you visit New Zealand, check the moon is the right way up (and that water goes down the plug hole clockwise..!  :-)

Big moon picture

This image is 711x719 pixels, suitable for wall paper on an SVGA screen.

At full moon, craters, scarps, rilles and valleys are poorly seen, because the lighting is not side on.

Some things do show up well with the frontal lighting:

•  Differences in the lava flows,

•  Splatter formations like Tycho and Copernicus,

•  White, reflective floors of some craters,

• Rays from some craters.

• (The crater Copernicus and the top of Mare Crisium make a horizontal line when lined up truly east and west, as both are about 10 degrees North).
• (The top of Mare Nectaris and bottom of Mare Humorum also roughly line up East-West)
• (Tycho is about 11 degrees West, 43 degrees South).

NB: This fast loading, layered image works in Opera 5 and Internet Explorer but not in Netscape:

Go to star diagonal view of the near full moon, with crater labels

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LUNAR LINKS Amateur Links to the moon have proved ephemeral and most of them no longer work, so have been removed. Selenographia atlas including  Phase and age Calculator seems to grab the time from your computer and displays the answer immediately. Also an excellent lunar atlas using CLA professional photographs. Judging by the guest book, it is very popular with New Zealander's.   Professional The Lunar Orbiter Photographic Atlas of the Moon by Bowker and Hughes  This is a reference manual to global photographic coverage of the Moon, but it is not the same as photographing from earth! The Consolidated Lunar Atlas by Gerald P. Kuiper, Ewen A. Whitaker, Robert G. Strom, John W. Fountain, and Stephen M. Larson   Professional moon photographs. These are the "eat your heart out" pictures for lunar photographers - match these and you are in heaven! Clementine Lunar Image Browser "Sections of a 58 megabyte image created from Clementine data are returned to the user at multiple resolutions, multiple sizes and centered on whatever part of the Moon the user wishes. Consequently users can zoom in to a location of interest. This multi-resolution feature is implemented using a wavelet compression technology, known as MrSID, developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory as part of the Sunrise Project." (information from Los Alamos National Laboratory) Moon and sun data for any day (US Naval Observatory)

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