Sky & Telescope - July 2019 - 84

FOCAL POINT by Christopher Cokinos

During an emotional crisis, the
author rediscovers the visual
wonders of our Moon.
EACH MONTH, when the Moon

returns, the ﬁrst "sea" I routinely
observe is Mare Crisium - the Sea of
Crises - and the ﬁrst "lake" I look for
is the limb-foreshortened Lacus Temporis - the Lake of Time.
The Moon is always there, at least
in our lives, lit or dark, seen or not, a
frigid or scalding rocky globe of pits
and rubble, of mountains and scars,
our companion in gravity and evolution, symbol, territory, night light,
and silent siren for predators, mythic
werewolves, lovers, geologists, and,
soon again, astronauts. For me, until
recently, as for other stargazers,

84

J U LY 2 0 1 9 * S K Y & T E L E S C O P E

observing program from the apparently defunct American Lunar Society
(ALS), whose website once included a
plan to observe nearly 100 features.
So for several lunations I stayed up
late, got up early, and exclaimed at low
volcanic domes, pumped my ﬁst at crater chains, and smiled at just-noticed
notches in crater rims.
When I went ahead and sent my
observing log to the ALS contact anyway, he wrote back with a kind letter -
and my "diploma," the Lunar Study and
Observing Certiﬁcate, which made me
unreasonably happy.
Now I plan on doing another
observing project using the Royal
Astronomical Society of Canada's list.
I can start a separate one for Charles
Woods's Lunar 100, and there's the
RASC's even more ambitious Lunar
1,000 Challenge - observing 1,000
named features on the Moon. When
I'm more comfortable with sketching
and calculating colongitude, I'll pursue
certiﬁcation with the Association of
Lunar and Planetary Observers.
In The Moon Observer's Handbook,
Fred Price writes that "personal cares
and problems are best not brought to
the telescope . . ." Yet those sent me to
the Moon. Now its beauty, history, and
science engender an equanimity both
curious and satisfying. I ﬂy over the
Moon with my eyepiece. I walk there
with my maps. I get lost less often.
¢ CHRIS COKINOS is co-editor of the
anthology Beyond Earth's Edge: The
Poetry of Spaceﬂight, due out in 2020.

A R TISTIC M O R N ING CO M POS ITE: JTBAS K IN PH OTO / M O M E NT / G E T T Y IM AG ES

Still as
Bright

the Moon was a bane bleaching out
fainter, far-ﬂung gray-green galaxies
and nebulae.
Not long ago, I found myself questioning, if not everything, then quite a
bit - mortality, happiness, profession.
I'd run my hand along the spines of
philosophy titles in a used bookstore in
Tucson, Arizona, tip one out, and purchase it to read at home in a certain
silence. I'd sit down to meditate, trying
to focus on breath instead of mistakes.
I'd talk with my wife in a gravelly yard
behind our old adobe house beneath
mesquites or the giant tamarisk.
Too tired, too low, I couldn't bring
myself to haul the telescope to where
skies darken and the Andromeda
Galaxy blossoms enough for me to see
with my naked eye. Ever since moving
to Tucson from four riverside acres
in rural Utah, I'd spent far less time
under night skies than I used to - one
of several touchstones I'd slowly lost in
my recent clotted, frantic city years.
So I began to do something different: pay attention to the Moon.
Using my 10-inch Dobsonian, I spent
evenings sweeping across landscapes
that made me gasp at dramatic gouges,
sunlit peaks and sharp shadows, white
sprays of ejecta.
With a growing array of maps and
atlases, I memorized features - their
names, their topography, their history - and realized that I needed more
direction to the sublime and often
confusing lunar surface, its craters
upon craters, wrinkle ridges, lava
plains obvious or demure. I found an
Sky & Telescope - July 2019

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