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| "Valuable resource" |
Product Rating:
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| Posted By: John Borden |
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Date Posted: 2011-12-09 23:33:36
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Comments:
Living in Los Angeles' light-polluted skies, I decided four years ago to more or less give up on the deep-sky stuff and turn to the Moon. It's one of the few objects I can observe well with my small telescope from home without driving for two hours out to dark skies.
Besides the telescope itself, this map is by far the most valuable resource I have. The moon is a truly beautiful and spectacular object to observe, but unless you do it intelligently even it can become tiresome after awhile. After you've gone "wow, look at that!" a few times the thrill begins to wear off. Using a map to help you find and identify lunar features is, I believe, absolutely essential to maintaining your interest, and this Field Map Of The Moon fits the bill very well. I can easily sit at my 'scope for an hour or two, often much longer, without becoming bored.
This map is well designed with it's large size and folding quadrant layout. I like the fact that there is considerable overlap on each panel between the quadrants so you don't have to flip it back and forth when viewing something near one of the folds. Its lamination is tough and it can take a lot of abuse. Rukl's artwork is superb, making identification of features easy. For the most part it's very accurate. I have found a few very minor exceptions to this, but they do not detract from the overall usefulness of the map. I particularly like the Mirror Image edition, since I use a refractor with a 90-degree diagonal.
Thanks to this map I've been able to identify, over the last few years, literally hundreds of lunar features, and I've memorized over 150 of them. I especially enjoy being able to identify the general location of each of the six Apollo moon landings. True, there's more to lunar observation than merely memorizing craters, and Charles Wood's excellent column in Sky and Telescope, "Exploring the Moon", as well as his book "The Modern Moon", can help you there. But just being able to identify what you're looking at is a great start and will help you maintain a fascination with the moon that will last a lifetime.
Get this map! You won't regret it, and it will offer you years of rewarding lunar observations.
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