Yesterday was the first Saturday of the season for beginners night out there.
We had about twenty astronomers from the club out there. I only saw a few visitors, but I arrived very late and only took these photos of the moon through Ken's telescope. I didn't bring out the canon EOS to take photos of the members there and their rigs out.
The large crater in the left photo is easily spotted with most telescopes, but a lot more detail and fine gradient hues can be seen in a larger telescope. These photos don't really do the visual view justice. We could see a lot more than these photos relay.
The image on the right shows two craters if you hunt for them you may find them, which have a light colored patch which trails off making them look like a kind of artistic representation of a couple of comets with two tails. There craters were named after Charles Messier a famous astronomer who made a list of "non comet" objects in the night sky that he would mistake for comets. Messier was a comet hunter who never found any great comets, but made up this list to help other comet hunters who might mistake one of these other faint or fuzzy objects as a comet. His list became known as the Messier list and has many spectacular nebulas, open and globular clusters and galaxies which astronomers love to look at. Ironically he is known for his "non-comet" list instead of a comet he may have discovered.
Someone looking at the moon, saw these craters and thought they look like comets, artistically and they named the craters after Messier.
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