Introduction

Perhaps my earliest memory is driving out to Grandma's house, at night, watching the moon from the back seat of the family Duster, and wondering why we weren't leaving it behind.

By the time I was seven years old, and was growing up as a curious boy in Ohio, I was given spyglass-style telescope - the kind with a couple of drawtubes for focusing. If my memory is correct, this spyglass was made by Bushnell and offered a magnification of 11x and an aperture of around 50mm. It had a small tabletop tripod with a thumbscrew that could be tightened to lock the instrument in place.

Being ignorant in the ways of astronomy, I spent a good deal of time looking at the moon with this telescope through my family's dining room window. The telescope could be set up on the dining-room table, and the convenient westerly facing window would offer the moon early in the evening anytime before first quarter. I don't recall any particular disappointment at the views through what must have been an optically atrocious window made in the 1940's at the earliest.

This was the beginning of what I can only call a love affair with the moon of the most sustained kind. This early lunar observing predates even my interest in the stars. It wasn't until a couple years later that I took up my grandmother's opera glasses and began to look at the rest of the night sky. And it wasn't until I was 12 or so that I began observing the moon with my very first astronomical telescope.

I now reside in southeastern Arizona, in the moderate climate of the high deserts to the southeast of Tucson. I have not succeeded in leaving the moon behind yet, and in the intervening years I have made the moon a special recreational study. I have become fascinated with the geology of our sister world. I used to observe the moon simply because it was there, and there was so much detail to see. Over the years the interest shifted to observing the moon because the detail began to mean something - a cataclysmic explosion here, a dribbling of metal-rich lavas there. Everything there is to see on the moon got there through some sort of process, and most of the time the observer can figure out just what process was at work. Different materials stand out on the moon - sometimes starkly, sometimes more subtly. The contrast between the bright highlands and the dark basalt of the mare is only the beginning. I have become fascinated - some would say obsessed - at seeing all of this for myself.

I've enjoyed studying the moon's geology in the years since that little boy looked at the moon through the dining room window. I've sought out primary sources in libraries, and I've spent a shameful amount of money stocking my own shelves with important references. I've been privileged to meet some of the true giants of lunar research - people like Ewen Whitaker, Steve Larson, Harrison Schmitt, and probably the greatest lunar geologist of all time, Gene Shoemaker.

These pages as they are today are the result of my getting a book contract cancelled by my publisher (don't cry for me - I was well compensated, and had gotten no farther than completing some of the research). I was motivated to begin writing a book by the desire to share my passion for observing the moon with a mind to its geological history with other amateurs like myself. While I am no lunar scientist, I have tried to draw my data from primary sources, and ask questions of true experts when I don't understand the issues myself. I've tried to follow the consensus opinion where there is one, and where that doesn't seem to exist I have simply gone with what seems most plausible to me. I offer no apologies for the limitations imposed by this practice, but it may be of benefit for you to be aware of them.

These webpages are a guide to the telescopically observable geology of the moon. They are geared toward the user of a small telescope. For the bulk of the observations made for this project, I've used a 5" refractor. I have also had the privilege of making some observations with a 9" Brashear refractor, and fine 8" and 10" reflectors. A few brief observations were taken with the finest telescope ever made - the 24" Clark refractor at Lowell Observatory. But most of what is described here can be seen with a much smaller instrument than my primary 5" scope, and it is doubtful anything mentioned here requires more than a 10" telescope at the most. The notes here are not meant to be comprehensive. I hope to leave enough for observers to discover on their own, while whetting the appetite with the important bits encountered along the way.

I hope you accept this invitation to join me on this most fascinating journey.

Jeff Medkeff
Sierra Vista, Arizona
September 2001