Figure 1.  Waning Gibbous, age 17.6 days, 2 days after full moon phase.  October 15, 2000, 3:30 AM, PDST.  Composite of 10 images taken with a Meade Pictor 416XTE CCD imager, 9 ms exposures, at the prime focus of a Meade LX-200 10-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope, "stopped down" in aperture to 4.6-inchs.  Thin cirrus clouds came in at 4:00 AM, halting my sequence of CCD-sized images and leaving bare spots in the mosaic.

Some of the individual images in this mosaic are presented below, at full resolution.  The "seeing" on this night was excellent, and some images show spatial structure as small as 1"arc, which is close to the ground-based limit.  Although you can always download any image you see on the internet, I've made it easy for you by "linking" each image to itself, meaning that to download it for viewing with your favorite viewer (for zooming, then roaming at higher resolution) all you have to do is click the desired image.

Figure 2.  Southwest quadrant, view of terminator, and a "ray" from Tycho crossing from left to upper-right into Mare Nectaris. (You may click this image to download it for exploring at any zoom level with your favorite viewer.)

Figure 3.  Northwest quadrant.w Mare Serenitatis is on the left, with crater Posidonius on it's upper-right border.  The mostly-shaded crater at the top is Endymion.

Figure 3.  North pole region of the moon, with the terminator on the right.  The bright, rayed crater is Anaxagoras, and the old filled-in (dark) crater is Plato, at the northern edge of Mare Imbrium.

Figure 4.  Some of the same image (Anaxagoras on the right, etc).

Figure 5.  Crater Aristarchus, perhaps the brightest large crate on the moon, dominates the lower part of this image.

Figure 6.  Notice the moutain on the limb. It is almost exactly 2 pixels high, or 13,000 feet!  Crater Kepler is on the right side.

Figure 7.  Crater Tycho is in the lower-right corner, and one ray system is uite visible extending northward.  The bright crater near the limb is Byrgius.  Mare Humorum lies between these two rayed craters.

Figure 8.  Crater Copernicus is right of center, with smaller neighbor Kepler to its left.  Both ray systems are apparent near full moon phases, but much less so at other phases.

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This site opened:  October 15, 2000.  Last Update:  September 11 2001.