Messier & Messier A

[Nightspore]

Messier and Messier A are a pair of relatively young impact craters in the Sea of Fecundity. The floors of the craters have a higher albedo in comparison to the surrounding mare area.

 

 

Messier A is an oblong shaped, roughly eleven kilometre wide crater, with distinctive ejecta rays. Over a period of decades there has been considerable debate on how these craters were formed . It is most likely an incoming object with a shallow trajectory skipped as it impacted creating both craters and the corresponding ejecta.

 

 

On Thursday the fifth of May at 21:00 BST the Moon will be 21.5% illuminated with an altitude of 38°. I would recommend a magnification of at least 70x to see the ejecta rays.

 

Images by courtesy of SkySafari Pro

[+Streetbob]

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get out last night. Sunday is looking a possibility though.

[Nightspore]

3 hours ago, Streetbob said:

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get out last night. Sunday is looking a possibility though.

 

I got out at about 21:00 until 23:30. Seeing was above average but there were transparency issues. I could see the ejecta rays. After around an hour I switched to splitting doubles. The Moon is First Quarter on Sunday. Gruithuisen's 'Wallwerk' or 'lunar city' should be easily observed. Mind you, this is the same bloke who saw the giant Moon fleas. I'm guessing he didn't clean his OTA regularly lol.

[BAZ]

Some nice Moon bothering there Dave, When you were out looking at the Moon, we had almost complete cloud cover here. 

[Nightspore]

21 hours ago, BAZ said:

Some nice Moon bothering there Dave, When you were out looking at the Moon, we had almost complete cloud cover here. 

 

Thanks. The seeing was above average but there were some transparency issues. Eventually non-transparent clouds! lol