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

[JAMES RUTLEDGE]

You’re getting pretty good with those cell phone shots Mike! Despite the haze, you could see some traces of the Ray.
Congrats on catching the Ray even on a slim to none (and frosty) night! Awesome!
Jim

Sent from my iPhone

> On Jan 20, 2024, at 12:29 PM, Mike McCabe <cartech2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> January 19th, 2024; Notes From the Field – Hesiodus Ray Observation
> 
> I’ll take slim over none any day of the week. The forecast for Friday’s foray into lunar observing was absolutely abominable, and if you just went by that then you probably missed out the opportunity to make an observation that in all likelihood won’t become available again until sometime next year, and that’s only if we’re lucky. The Hesiodus Ray truly is an elusive thing.
> 
> At 5:45pm I stepped out into that biting cold air to find that the Moon was glowing through the clouds. I pulled out a scope and pointed it 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 could even see the dark gap in the western wall of Pitatus that creates the ray in Hesiodus. I walked away from the scope feeling cautiously hopeful, knowing full well that the conditions could worsen at any given moment and stay that way for the night.
> 
> Over the next hour and a half I went back to the scope several 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 the timing of the predictions.
> 
> The data from 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 on January 20, 2024. When we subtract the five hour EST differential we come up with a time of 19:05 EST on the 19th for us. I can tell you with a fair amount of certainty that at 7pm no ray was not visible on the floor of Hesiodus. It was then that I started to wonder if the prediction timing was based on DST, and even now I can’t say for sure if it is or not.
> 
> What did happen between 5:45pm and 7:15pm was that a point of light became progressively more visible on the western wall of Hesiodus, as did the tops of the walls around Hesiodus and Hesiodus ‘A’. But nothing appeared along the floor, at least under the sky conditions that I was viewing through.
> Eventually though some semblance of the ray did start to form on the floor of Hesiodus, and that didn’t happen until after 8pm when the conditions at that time were fairly abysmal, making critical observations of the progress a real challenge. At a couple 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 the effort worth standing in the cold any longer, I put everything away. At that point I had concluded that the ray began forming around 8pm, which served to lend some support to the DST theory on the prediction timing.
> 
> Then a funny thing happened. At around 9:30pm or so I was considering wrapping up my day when I took a quick walk outside to check things out. The conditions in the sky appeared to have improved somewhat, and so out came the scope again. This time the ray was readily apparent at 150x in the eyepiece, and for kicks I bumped it up to 185x to see what would happen. I wasn’t sure what I would get. Sometimes magnification helps and sometimes it hurts, and with the haze as prominent as it was on this night it was a roll of the dice, albeit a relatively low risk roll. Changing eyepieces is pretty low impact as risks go.  J
> 
> As the viewing often is in the haze, the image was steady with no vibrations or undulations, but the haze definitely masked a lot of detail in the view. Regardless the ray was definitively there, and now the effort was a delightful success. It may not have been a high-def view, but given the forecast, and then the somewhat workable conditions and in spite of the cold temps, it felt like a triumph.
> 
> In the images above, the 4.5” Newtonian is pointed at the Moon, and a cell phone shot through the eyepiece @185x conveys the hazy conditions fairly well but doesn’t resolve the finer details as well as the eye could at the time. Pitatus is virtually centered in the illuminated area of the picture, with Hesiodus hanging below it. If you looked close you can barely make out the ray, and the Straight Wall to the left of Pitatus. They both looked better in the live view.
> You may remember that a few days ago when I shared this potential observing opportunity with you I said that, based on the forecast, the chances of seeing it were slim to none. Fortunately, once again, slim wins the day!!!
> 
> Keep Looking Up!
> 
> Sincerely,
> Mike McCabe
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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