On the night of October 11, but technically the very early morning of October 12, 2019 between the hours of 0:45-1:21 EDT I honed into an area of the 98% Waxing Gibbous moon just east of the terminator. I focused on a bright spot I found and it's neighboring crater. The two I focused on were the craters Herodotus and Aristarchus. I know on this blog I have spent most of it's life (and my other blog with which I lost all the posts when transferring back to this blog) doing astrophotography, but I've been wanting to get back into sketching for quite a while. I'll refer to all sketches as astrosketchography.
A quick bit of information pulled from Wikipedia about these two craters. First, Herodotus is the darker of the two craters, and to it's east is Aristarchus. North of the two craters is the Cobra Head, and Vallis Schroeter which is assumed to have originated due to volcanic activity in the moons history. Aristarchus is about 40km in diameter with a depth of 2700 meters, and Herodotus is a bit smaller in size with a diameter of 35km and a depth of 1500 meters.
My observations at the telescope: These two craters are relatively small in the eyepiece with Herodotus showing a more prominent shape, while Aristarchus is bright with no real structure visible. Cobra Head and Vallis Schroeter is quite difficult to make out, but stands out against some of the brighter features nearby. These are not along the terminator so not much shadow to bring out any possible hidden features washed out by the direct sunlight.
The first image is a badly taken cellphone shot through my eyepiece of the area I was sketching, and the second image is a picture of my sketch. Any and all editing of the sketch was done on the actual paper in which I sketched with, none of it was done digitally.
I used my Celestron 8" SCT on my CG-5 mount with a Vixen 8-24mm zoom eyepiece set at 8mm for the observation. Image was sketched onto regular white printer paper and I used 2B and 6B pencils, and a blending stump.
A quick bit of information pulled from Wikipedia about these two craters. First, Herodotus is the darker of the two craters, and to it's east is Aristarchus. North of the two craters is the Cobra Head, and Vallis Schroeter which is assumed to have originated due to volcanic activity in the moons history. Aristarchus is about 40km in diameter with a depth of 2700 meters, and Herodotus is a bit smaller in size with a diameter of 35km and a depth of 1500 meters.
My observations at the telescope: These two craters are relatively small in the eyepiece with Herodotus showing a more prominent shape, while Aristarchus is bright with no real structure visible. Cobra Head and Vallis Schroeter is quite difficult to make out, but stands out against some of the brighter features nearby. These are not along the terminator so not much shadow to bring out any possible hidden features washed out by the direct sunlight.
The first image is a badly taken cellphone shot through my eyepiece of the area I was sketching, and the second image is a picture of my sketch. Any and all editing of the sketch was done on the actual paper in which I sketched with, none of it was done digitally.
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| Handheld cellphone image taken through the eyepiece |
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| Sketch of Herodotus and Aristarchus. North is towards bottom left, east is lower right. |
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