A fun time surveying the moon throughout the binocular telescope

I took some audio notes to review.

Sitting in a chair with moon atlas running on the iPad. I selected a mare and started searching to match craters and other features.

I ended my viewing with a pair of 15mm eyepieces in the Vixen binocular telescope.

I could see the a b c d craters that correspond to the messier craters. The smallest of these being 1.6 miles across. It looked like a bright dot. You could tell it was a crater.

I could see more detail with my left eye. The right eye for example would not see the 1.6 mile crater but it would blink in and out. The right eye would confirm what the left was viewing and the small crater would pop in and out of 3d perception.

Here's a screen shot of the messier craters, from the moon atlas program. The streaks to the left really looked like a comet, with the messier craters appearing as the head of the comet. A fitting name for the craters.

For those of you wondering, just how good and how much detail a pair of binoculars that have 3 inches of glass for each eye can be, the detail I saw was better from a crater perspective than what is shown zoomed in fully with this program. There were a lot of craters and this with an almost full moon. However the ridges were less visible than with the Moon Atlas program. There were a lot more bright spots and you could see more bright ejection paths from crater impacts than this program will show on the map. The shading was more subtle than shown in the moon atlas. And this was under viewing conditions that were far from ideal. A larger telescope would show more information. One member of the FAAC club mentioned that the moon map programs seem to lack the contextual view (maybe they need a split screen mode) for the iphone or ipod touch. This may be a problem. I actually don't have a moon atlas loaded on my iPhone so I can't confirm that. I can say the iPad had a large enough screen to easily see the context of what you were looking at and zoom in to look at details and figure out what you were seeing. I could have spent 10 hours of moon watching with the Moon atlas sitting on my lap, but you have to stop and get some sleep. With bigger scopes you can see even more detail. The moon atlas at $6 seems to show a lot of detail, but naked eye astronomy through the telescope shows so much more detail, I found myself wondering if there was a way to have a more detailed linked map, something like the other moon mapping program that has a poor interface. That other moon mapping program called moonmap pro has a very unstandard and segmented interface.

MoonMap Pro is not as user friedly, but the satillite maps of the moon in great detail. It would be great if some kind of mapping software could combine the two. In reviewing this post and adding to it, I pulled up the MoonMap Pro software and looked at seciton 42 which contains high resolution sattillite imagery of some of the earlier areas I was looking at. I looks like you could use the Moon Atlas program on the iPad to get your bearings and figure out what section and detailed features you are looking at, then fire up the MoonMap Pro and start drilling down into sections to get a really close detailed view that is greater than you'd see in your small telescope. See my next post for a sample screen shot of the MoonMap Pro close up view.





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