nine-day moon

Lunar creature features

Rabbit on the full moon

Night owls can enjoy the nine-day moon – it’s up all night long. In my sketch, the magnificent crater Copernicus is visible on the sunlit side of the terminator – on the right side of the lunar center. It looks so insignificant right now, but [...]]]>

nine-day moon

Lunar creature features

Rabbit on the full moon

Night owls can enjoy the nine-day moon – it’s up all night long. In my sketch, the magnificent crater Copernicus is visible on the sunlit side of the terminator – on the right side of the lunar center. It looks so insignificant right now, but at full moon, its spendid ray system is a naked-eye delight! Tonight you see the deep crater floor half lit by the sun. Here’s a closeup of Copernicus sketched through a larger telescope at higher magnification (185x versus 19x on these full disk drawings) on nearly the same day of the lunar month.

From now until full moon, the dark lunar mare start to resemble creature features. I see half of the rabbit on the moon in my sketch. Mare Fecundatis and Mare Nectaris make the ears and Mare Tranquillatis (the Sea of Tranqulilty) makes a cute little bunny head. You can see other creatures in my February 2009 What’s Up podcast about the moon, linked below.

As we near the full moon, the sun angle is more direct and crater wall shadows disappear. There are some other craters on the terminator tonight, which will reveal their amazing ejecta rays in a few more days when the moon is full. Towards the left edge of the terminator, Tycho is half lit now, but at full moon, its rays extend 1000 km. The spectacular walled plain Clavius is just starting to reveal its beauty. Through a telescope, when the entire crater is visible, you’ll see a dozen smaller craters on its floor.

My What’s Up Podcast, July 2007: The phases of the moon

My What’s Up Podcast, February 2009: Galileo’s and other first views of the moon through a telescope

My photo of the nine-day moon

sketch of 3-day old waxing moon 2-28-09

sketch of 5-day old waxing moon

sketch of 14-day (full) moon 3/11/09

Galileo’s watercolor drawings were made with brown ink wash on watercolor paper. To me, these are the most beautiful of Galileo’s astronomical renderings. When I look at the [...]]]>

Folio page 28 manuscript copy of Sidereus Nuncius

sketch of 3-day old waxing moon 2-28-09

sketch of 5-day old waxing moon

sketch of 14-day (full) moon 3/11/09

Galileo’s watercolor drawings were made with brown ink wash on watercolor paper. To me, these are the most beautiful of Galileo’s astronomical renderings. When I look at the lunar terminator through my own telescopes, and hunt for interesting features to sketch, I sometime daydream, and try to imagine what Galileo thought as he surveyed these surprising lunar features. I feel a tingle every time I see the sunrise or the sunset illuminate a lunar crater floor, or escape through a crumbling wall to create a fleeting sun ray.

I’ve been sketching the moon for about 20 years, but I’ve always focused on a small segment of the lunar terminator as my sketching target. I’d never tried to sketch the entire moon in one sitting before. Sketching the entire lunar disk is a daunting project. So I decided to make my sketches very small – three sketches to a page. I like to show my “rough sketch” first. It is sort of a outline of the major features. Then I create a finer sketch, filling in the details. Often, I make a third “final final” sketch, too.

I used a 5″ x 8″ inch bound sketch book instead of my usual 3.5 x 5 inch 400 Series Strathmore spiral bound sketch pad. I always use my slender set of 12 mix and match Pitt pure graphite, Castell fine, and Wasserlack bold Faber-Castell graphite art set pencils. I like to keep the sketching process simple and uncluttered and the supplies compact. No table, no lights shining off my forehead, no messy products that would get on my Zeiss eyepieces or my fingers. Armed with these supplies, all I have to do is wait for the moon to become visible on a night of above-average seeing.

Here is a partial collection of “cropped” lunar sketch pages made at the eyepiece of my 70mm Televue f/7.8 Ranger refractor. I haven’t completed my “Galileo-like” lunar sketches yet because I prefer to wait for those nights of exceptional seeing to sketch at the eyepiece, and I am in no hurry to finish this project. These crops don’t show the “rough” sketch, and are rotated to match Galileo’s brown ink wash paintings. There is one full sketch linked at the bottom of this article, and I’ll dedicate one future blog to each of the lunar sketches.

I used one of the finest planetary eyepieces to complement my telescope — a 25mm Zeiss Abbe Orthoscopic. This gave me a 19x view of the lunar surface, similar to what you would see through a pair of binoculars, but also similar to the magnification (but not the same field of view) of Galileo’s telescope, which was 21x. Twentieth century Extra-Low Dispersion (“ED”) glass in the Televue Ranger and the exceptional quality of the Zeiss Abbe orthoscopic eyepieces plus a wider field of view give me quite an advantage, but that’s the telescope and eyepieces I have at my disposal. Lucky me!

An example of my uncropped 3-to-a-page lunar sketches through a 70mm refractor