THE MOON THROUGH YOUR TELESCOPE

If you’re thinking about getting an instrument or already have one, here’s what you can see on the lunar surface with it

To the naked eye our planet’s natural satellite is a small bonewhite disc with some dark markings and a couple of bright spots on it. However, seen through even a small telescope the Moon is a stunning sight, covered with fascinating details and features the eye alone can’t see.

The first thing you’ll notice is that the Moon’s face is split into very different light and dark areas. The light areas, which astronomers call the ‘lunar highlands’, are very rough and made out of countless thousands of holes, or craters, in places packed so close together they seem to overlap. Some of the craters are hundreds of kilometres across, with strikingly sharp raised rims and tall mountain peaks in their centres, while others are much smaller pits only a few kilometres wide. All the large craters and many of the smaller ones have names honouring astronomers and other famous scientists and explorers.

The dark areas appear much flatter than the highlands, and are spattered with fewer craters too. These are the famous lunar seas, or maria, but they are not seas of water – the maria are areas covered over by molten lava which flowed across the Moon many billions of years ago after huge meteorite impacts. The seas have names too, and you’ll already know one of them even if you’ve never looked at the Moon before – Mare Tranquillitatis, the Sea of Tranquillity, where Neil Armstrong took his famous one small step for man in 1969 when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. You can use our chart above to find it through your telescope. The other seas have romantic and evocative names such as the Sea of Serenity, the Sea of Nectar and even the Sea of Clouds.

Your telescope will show you systems of bright lines radiating away from some craters, like the cracks in a broken window. These are called rays, and they are made of rock and dust that sprayed across the Moon after the crater was formed, just as you would get if you threw a stone onto a frozen lake. Craters surrounded by rays are young – in astronomical terms, at least. They were formed after the huge lava floods that created the seas. You can see a crater on the left side of the Moon that is surrounded by a beautiful system of bright rays. This is Copernicus, the ‘Monarch of the Moon’, and it is almost 100 kilometres (62 miles) across. Down near the bottom of the Moon you’ll see another rayed crater – 85-kilometre (53- mile) wide Tycho. Just like Copernicus, you can tell Tycho was formed relatively recently because its rays are sprayed over older features beneath them.

The Moon has towering mountain ranges too, as dramatic as any on Earth. Through your telescope you’ll see a very striking curved feature towards the top centre of the Moon. These are Montes Apenninus, which separate Mare Imbrium from Mare Serenitatis, and they stretch for more than 600 kilometres (373 miles) across the lunar surface. Montes Apenninus comprise over 3,000 peaks, including the highest mountain on the Moon, Mons Huygens, which is 5.5 kilometres (3.4 miles) high.

Those are just some of the features you will see on the Moon the first time you look at it through your telescope. Don’t worry about finding out the names of all the craters, seas and mountains straight away – you’ll have plenty of time to do that. Instead just enjoy looking at the Moon as you’ve never seen it before. As it moves across your eyepiece, imagine you’re flying over its battered surface in a spaceship, just as the Apollo crews did all those years ago.