Figure 1.  Full moon rising above cloud deck on eastern horizon, October 12, 2000, 6:51 PM, PDST, age 15.4 days.  Nikon Coolpix 990 with x3 telephoto converter lens, 1/15 xecond, f/4.4, ISO 100.

Figure 2.  Same camera set-up, 25 seconds after the previous picture, cropped.

Figure 3.  4.5 hours later, with the moon high in the sky (and therefore less yellow), I used the Nikon Coolpix with a 10x70 binocular, using two tripods. The crater Tycho dominates the southern hemisphere highlands, with a ray structure that extends across most of the moon in a few cases.

Figure 4.  Age 15.5 days, using the same set-up as in the previous picture but with a greater Nikon zoom factor.  This image is purposefully darker than the visual appearance, to aide in "locating" the partial moon views that follow.

Figure 5.  Mosaic of images taken with a Meade 416XTE CCD imager attached to the prime focus of a Meade LX-200 10-inch SCT, 9 millisecond exposure time, f/6.2, 9:05 PM, October 12.  Crater Tycho shows a central peak, a ring of darker material that gives way to a more expansive field of lighter material created by the throughing out of undarkened underlying lunar regolith when the impact created the crater.  For a better view, click on this image and use your image viewer to zoom and roam at higher magnification.

Figure 6.  Detail of crater Tycho, source of the ray structure that streatches across most of the visible moon's surface.

Figure 7.  Detail of Copernicus region, with Kepler near the top border.  Notice the several dark maria regions to the lower-right of Copernicus.  Sunlight "ages" the lunar soil, or regolith, and makes it dark.  These dark regions must have been left undisturbed longer than elsewhere.  By contrast, the bright, more reflective areas are "new" regolith, recently uncovered by relatively recent meteor impacts.  In this image the brightest areas reflect more than three times as much sunlight as the darkest areas.

Figure 8.  This is the "left side" of the full moon, again taken with the Meade 416XTE CCD imager.   Copernicus is in the lower-right corner, and to its left is Kepler crater, with a smaller "version" of the Cpernican ray system.  Bright Aristarchus crater is near the top, and dark Grimaldi, on the left, appears like a tiny maria.

Figure 9.  Another CCD image, showing the "upper-right" region.  Mare Serenetatis is at the top, and Mare Tranquilitatis is below it.  My microwave maps of the moon show that Tranquilitatis is more "abosrbing"  of microwaves than any other region, indicating that it has a greater abundance of the titanium-bearing mineral ilmenite.  Bright Proclus crater is on the right, near the distinctive haf-mare/half-highland Palus Somni.

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This site opened:  October 9, 2000.  Last Update:  October 12, 2000.