[Friends_of_SSASTROS] Notes From The Field, Baby It's Cold Outside

[Mike McCabe]

January 19th, 2024; NotesFrom the Field – Hesiodus Ray Observation

I’ll take slim over none any day of the week. The forecast forFriday’s foray into lunar observing was absolutely abominable, and if you justwent by that then you probably missed out the opportunity to make anobservation that in all likelihood won’t become available again until sometimenext year, and that’s only if we’re lucky. The Hesiodus Ray truly is an elusivething.

At 5:45pm I stepped out into that biting cold air to findthat the Moon was glowing through the clouds. I pulled out a scope and pointedit at Luna. The detail was seriously hampered by the very poor transparency,but still I could make out the Straight Wall and the crater Pitatus. I couldeven see the dark gap in the western wall of Pitatus that creates the ray inHesiodus. I walked away from the scope feeling cautiously hopeful, knowing fullwell that the conditions could worsen at any given moment and stay that way forthe night.
Over the next hour and a half I went back to the scopeseveral times, and indeed the conditions were worse more than they were better.But I did get to learn some things about the evolution of the ray and thetiming of the predictions.
The datafrom the Hesiodus Ray section of the Lunar Occultations website (Index)about when the ray would be visible showed a time of 00:05 Universal Time onJanuary 20, 2024. When we subtract the five hour EST differential we come upwith a time of 19:05 EST on the 19th for us. I can tell you with afair amount of certainty that at 7pm no ray was not visible on the floor ofHesiodus. It was then that I started to wonder if the prediction timing wasbased on DST, and even now I can’t say for sure if it is or not.
What didhappen between 5:45pm and 7:15pm was that a point of light became progressivelymore visible on the western wall of Hesiodus, as did the tops of the wallsaround Hesiodus and Hesiodus ‘A’. But nothing appeared along the floor, atleast under the sky conditions that I was viewing through.

Eventuallythough some semblance of the ray did start to form on the floor of Hesiodus, andthat didn’t happen until after 8pm when the conditions at that time were fairlyabysmal, making critical observations of the progress a real challenge. At acouple of points over the next half hour I did definitely see the ray though,and not thinking that conditions were going to improve enough to make theeffort worth standing in the cold any longer, I put everything away. At thatpoint I had concluded that the ray beganforming around 8pm, which served to lend some support to the DST theory on theprediction timing.

Then a funnything happened. At around 9:30pm or so I was considering wrapping up my daywhen I took a quick walk outside to check things out. The conditions in the skyappeared to have improved somewhat, and so out came the scope again. This timethe ray was readily apparent at 150x in the eyepiece, and for kicks I bumped itup to 185x to see what would happen. I wasn’t sure what I would get. Sometimesmagnification helps and sometimes it hurts, and with the haze as prominent asit was on this night it was a roll of the dice, albeit a relatively low riskroll. Changing eyepieces is pretty low impact as risks go.  J
As theviewing often is in the haze, the image was steady with no vibrations orundulations, but the haze definitely masked a lot of detail in the view. Regardless the raywas definitively there, and now the effort was a delightful success. It may nothave been a high-def view, but given the forecast, and then the somewhatworkable conditions and in spite of the cold temps, it felt like a triumph.
In theimages above, the 4.5” Newtonian is pointed at the Moon, and a cell phone shotthrough the eyepiece @185x conveys the hazy conditions fairly well but doesn’t resolvethe finer details as well as the eye could at the time. Pitatus is virtually centeredin the illuminated area of the picture, with Hesiodus hanging below it. If youlooked close you can barely make out the ray, and the Straight Wall to the leftof Pitatus. They both looked better in the live view.
You may rememberthat a few days ago when I shared this potential observing opportunity with youI said that, based on the forecast, the chances of seeing it were slim to none.Fortunately, once again, slim wins the day!!!

Keep LookingUp!
Sincerely,Mike McCabe









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