Lunar Observations: Fairbanks, AK, USA: 2024-01-20 (Publ. 2024-01-21)

Last night I spent about 30 minutes observing the waxing gibbous Moon, starting about 9pm. The great thing about observing the moon is that it is bright enough that I can observe it in the front yard of my apartment, where otherwise I would be tortured by light pollution in the skies and the glaring brightness of street and house lights in every direction. I used my old Jupiter 60-AZ refractor. I tried the 6mm eyepiece first but couldn't get it focused — not sure what was going on there. So I switched to the 12mm eyepiece. I also used the neodymium filter, as it seems to make the moon features look a little sharper.

I brought out my Knopf field guide and had a good time matching features to the diagram on plate 5. Some features that stood out to me were Copernicus crater near the equator, as well as Eratosthenes and other nearby features; the Plato crater in the far north; the Promontorium Lapace, an interesting projection of mountains to the west of Plato; and a prominent set of craters in the far south, which included Clavius, Tycho, Longomontanus, and Wilhelm. I'm working through the Byrne atlas to get more details on these features.

An interesting area of study, for the Biblical creationist, is trying to figure out how lunar geology should be understood in a YAC timescale. One 2014 paper by Dr. Faulkner goes into some detail on the subject, arguing that most of the craters should be understood as a result of Day 4 activity, but I'm not sure what additional research he has done on the subject since then.

Interpreting Craters in Terms of the Day Four Cratering Hypothesis, Answers Research Journal 7 (2014):11–25.