Bringing a crater home for a closer look
Shortcuts to portions of this entry
- Theophilus, nectar and molasses
- Stumbling across a scarp – and fortunately not down it ;-)
- Keeping warm – NOT!
- Cor Coroli
- Mizar
Now I’m more convinced then ever – the Moon is there to provide us a baby step. Getting a handle on it is huge – but doable.
I’m talking about awareness here – that sudden punch to the solar plexus that life can deliver in its worse – and best – moments. Well, I favor the best moments and am on a campaign to increase them – but I’m afraid for most of us, most of the time, true awareness comes only with genuinely life-shattering events. Meditators know there is a calmer, saner path to awareness, however, and it’s that path – the path of mindfulness – that I keep trying to bring to my astronomical observations.
Theophilus, nectar and molasses
This morning I tried to follow the path to the moon and then to a magnificent crater called Theophilus, which guards the southern side of the entrance to the Sea of Nectar. Nectar – honey indeed! On this morning – well, late afternoon from Nectar’s perspective – the lighting makes it look like someone poured molasses into the sea where it opens onto the Sea of Tranquility. (You gotta love the names on this side of the moon) Anyway, the floor is smooth and dark, but you can just picture this warm stuff oozing in, spreading out around the walls, then hardening into gentle ridges - wrinkles, really - before it could settle completely into one smooth sea.
It was those wrinkles in Nectar’s bleak floor that caught my eye first, but then I came back to Theophilus, this classic impact crater with the towering mountains in its center and what Charles Wood calls a scattering of little ponds of “impact melt” just outside the northern rim. Impact melt! Think of it. What we’re talking about is an explosion so colossal that the impact area isn’t simply blown into little bits – it is instantly melted into a sloshy, hot goo that is splashed out of the crater in huge globs forming these “ponds.” If I’m looking at the right features, there’s about seven that I could see on the northeast quadrant and they were irregular features about 5-10 miles across.
Now keep in mind, one such “pond” could pretty much cover a city the size of Providence, RI – and as for Theophilus itself, well that’s much larger. I’ve become familiar enough with the moon so I can take a pretty good guess at the size of a crater now, as it appears in the eyepiece. So when I spotted Theophilus yesterday morning I pegged it at roughly 60 miles in diameter. And, according to Rukl’s wonderful “Atlas of the Moon” it is 100 kilometers across which translates to 62.14 miles. But once you master this little skill of being able to measure distanceson the moon with your eye, you fall into the first trap of thinking you know the dimensions of what you are seeing. But when do we ever look at something 60-miles across here on our own planet – let alone look down on it from a quarter million miles away?
Yep, I’ve been on the top of Wachusetts mountain and from there spotted the skyline of Boston 30 miles away and I suspect some of the mountains I see to the northeast from there are as much as 60 miles away. But looking out over such distances at a low angle really doesn’t give you a firm grasp of the distances involved. You can drive 60 mile in a little less than an hour if you’re on a good highway, so that gives some feel for it. But for me it all came home with a special force when I looked at a map and made a circle roughly 60 miles in diameter on it. I first wanted to superimpose this over Rhode Island – but when I did so, Rhode Island vanished, as did a good chunk of the ocean.
So I centered that circle on the city of Worcester, Massachusetts – and borrowed a piece of Ed Roach’s photo of Theophilus to drive the point home. ( You can see the entire photo below. Ed is a Massachusetts amateur whose astro-photos can be found here. )
As I looked at the map with its lunar crater on it what was immediately apparent to me was much of the territory Bren and I have so frequently prowled in car and on foot – northern Rhode Island, Sturbridge, the towns to the west of Boston, southern New Hampshire, and that quaint little northwestern corner of Connecticut – all that vanishes and becomes a flat, lifeless, moonscape. In the middle – around Worcester - there would be a handful of huge (by Eastern standards) mountains – well, pretty much like the White Mountains of New Hampshire – if they were bald right down to the ground, that is. No trees, no grass, no flowers, no animals, no buildings, no people – just rocks. And getting into this great, circular plain in the first place would be a chore requiring scaling a steep outer rim nearly a mile high, then tumbling down the terraced inside slopes to the flat – more or less – floor. Lava dust, I believe – that fine grey, powdery stuff that now holds the footprints of man, in a few select locations – is probably what you would encounter.
You can build pictures like these. They are mental constructs – little pieces of data assembled from memory, books, and the Web. They are not reality. Reality is the energy that came from the sun and bounced off that ancient mass of rock and whatever we call the moon, before traveling to my telescope and eventually entering my eye. This is reality. Twenty-one degrees – lights from the far shore glancing off the river to the east – a partially rational fear of coyotes as you walk out in the backyard at 3 am - warm tea, cold air, cold hands and feet – eyes and mind and spirit at the telescope and distracted as well.
Reality yes - but it is not awareness. Not this morning. I hope it is a step in that direction. I have trouble describing awareness – more trouble finding it – but I know it when I am there and I am not there this morning. Instead I’m looking, absorbing a few details, getting excited about one thing or another, then scurrying to what I’ve dubbed “the office.” This last is my little roll-off observatory that covers the 15-inch most of the time, but rolls off and becomes a handy little shelter to keep a red light beaming on my charts and notebook, eyepieces and filters, and this morning, my two favorite moon books. Rukl’s and Wood’s “The Modern Moon.”
Here's Ed's full image of Theophilus, taken under much the same lighting that I saw it this morning.
Stumbling across a scarp – and fortunately not down it ;-)
I love the process of discovery. It is just sheer fun to spot something, as I did this morning, that has not sunk into my consciousness before. Keep in mind, lunar exploration is new to me. In this case I spotted a wonderful, jagged ridge with long flat runs that stretched about 400-to-500 kilometers from Catherina, a crater a bit south of Theophilus, to another dramatic crater, Piccolomini, just on the sunset line. Yeah! A quick look at Rukl and I know I’ve spotted Rupes Altai – “a 480 km-long scarplike range.” Fascinating. Just in this little corner of the moon I could spend days and hardly begin to exhaust its wonders.
Doctionary.com defines a scarp as “a long steep slope or cliff at the edge of a plateau or ridge; usually formed by erosion.” Fine, of course, except for that part about erosion. The moon has no erosion, as such – at least not what we would think of in terms of water and wind. So what caused this incredible scarp, casting so obvious a long, jagged shadow across the moon? I don’t know. Maybe another time . . .
I exhausted my exclamation point quota this morning – I only allow myself so many per page of field notes, and there’s so darned much to see around Nectar! I want to see this area at sunrise and I want to see it again at sunset – meaning sunrise and sunset on the moon, of course. But who knows when I’ll get another chance? The phase of the moon, the vagaries of the weather, and the ever-changing positions of moon, sun and earth all conspire to make each visual visit a new experience, always somewhat different from the last one – frequently dramatically different.
It’s thoughts like these that get intermingled with the view of the moonscape through the 15-inch using binoviewers and an eyepiece combination that yields about 208X. Yesterday I didn’t have much time to spend with Theophilus – I got a late start – about 5:30 am and was using the 8-inch in the dome. This morning I had out the larger telescope and had plenty of time – though the seeing was poor, this doesn’t bother me much. I’m not on a scientific expedition here to eeek out the last detail. In fact, details can just add clutter. As I say, I’m seeking awareness. (Side note – looks like you only get two or three days of really good lighting to study Theophilus by. I checked at 6 am this morning and the sun had set on it.)
Oh – I did a little prowling this morning also. But first I tested the idea of going in after 2 hours to warm up for 20 minutes. Doesn’t work. When I came out I seemed to get much colder much quicker. Maybe I need a little heater – inside – that really warms you up – and your coat and gloves. Getting them warm before putting them back on and going out again may be the key.
That said, with the bright moonlight this morning I could not easily find M51, a favorite target, so I switched to Cor Coroli – the “heart of Charles” and it was very nice – and easily split – in the 15-inch. I see this easy double star as white and violet. The Belmont Society , however, sees it as blue and white – hmmmm, guess I have a lot to learn when it comes to star colors.
On a lark I then turned to the easiest, best-known double in the sky – Mizar. This is really mutltiple stars. To the naked eye it looks like a single star in the handle of the Big Dipper. I’ve often read that the ancient Arabs saw this as a test of good eyesight – the challenge being to split the one into two. Binoculars leave no doubt there are two stars. A small telescope shows three in a triangle. The 15-inch takes one of those stars – Alcor – and easily splits it into a nice little gem of two stars so that the whole field is quite attractive. I like the comment from the Belmont Society Web page on these stars:
“ Mizar-A & B are each themselves a double, so that there are at least four components in this group (not seen here). It's easy to resolve the A-B pair in binoculars, and a cinch for small telescopes. Given a dark enough site, some observers say they can resolve it with the naked eye. (Yeah, uh-huh, right)!”
Ok – I’m a bit skeptical too – but then, my eyes aren’t very good and this is not a dark site – and that really doesn’t matter. It’s so easy to get wrapped up in all the details of observing and miss the more important stuff. The sense of awe continues to cut through light pollution, aging eyes, telescope malfunctions, and all the silly little clutter of day-to-day living that rushes through our minds unbidden. Every once in awhile I get something vaguely resembling awareness while at the telescope. No –that’s not right – I have had a few genuinely lucid moments. But to borrow from Robert Frost, I’ve got “miles to go before I sleep,” and the journey sure is fascinating.