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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
You can find an image to match the view through the eyepiece, 1 Jun 2000
I am a comparative newbie in lunar work, and I am quite happily working through Cherrington with my ETX 90mm at present. The comments below must be seen in this light, coloured further by the fact I have spent about 1 hour with the book!The book is the same size as 'Turn Left at Orion', and a bit smaller in format than Harold Hill's book of drawings. The hard-back binding opens without strain, but does not lie completely flat. Section I is 55 pages long and divided into two chapters. Chapter 1 is about observing the moon and includes details on libration, visual, photographic and CCD imaging, and comments on the choice of telescope. The author chose an SCT of large aperture with an apodising screen for the images in the atlas, although he recognises that this choice might be controversial. Chapter 2 gives a review of the formation and 'geology' of the Moon. Section II consists largely of a series of CCD images of the Moon's surface taken during 1995. The images are classified by co-longitude in two series from 291-357 degrees and from 3 to 247 degrees. 23 sets of images show the Moon waxing, one is 'near full' (4 quadrant limb images at moderate libration) and 23 show the Moon waning. The average co- longitude spacing is 6 or 7 degrees, and each image has had the exposure time adjusted so that features 8 to 10 degrees bright of the terminator are saturated. The images have all been processed to uniform contrast - this is an atlas not a picture book. Some of the images look 'distressed' to my amateur eyes, with white highlight areas and obvious pixelation. Still, it looks better to me than the Hatfield atlas. For each co-longitude, there is an introductory page describing the 'highlights' of that terminator state, and three whole page images - North, Central and South. There is a generous overlap between the images. The images have not been 'corrected' to any kind of map projection. The date, UT time, filtration (green, infrared, blue, 550nm narrow band), exact co-longitude, (geocentric?) libration and resolution per pixel (ranging from 0.67 km per pixel to 1.96) of each image is stated. Each whole page image has a caption showing a smaller 'greyed out' version of the image with labels on major features, and there is a scale in KM for each image. An appendix has a daily geocentric ephemeris of the Moon for the years 2000 to 2010 (Oh UT values of co-longitude and sun latitude, libration in longitude and latitude). The book has a feature index with 1000 features listed, and a list of the images in which each feature appears. This allows rapid comparison of the appearance of features at various illumination angles. The typesetting looks a little 'cluttered' to me (Roman double justified text, sometimes in narrow columns, run up against images in boxes, early chapters set very wide in single column text), it lacks the elegance of Rukl. I would have much preferred a spiral binding for use outside at the telescope. The ephemeris is perhaps a bit redundant given the accessibility of the JPL online ephemeris generator and other downloadable software. None of this detracts from the usefulness of the book in my view, these are minor issues. I think I will get a lot of evenings observation from this atlas, and I do not begrudge the asking price. It seems to be a natural follow on from Cherrington, and as the author remarks, it should be possible to find an image of any feature within a few degrees of illumination angle of what one can see at the eyepiece.
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