On Mon, 5 Mar 2007, (Marty) wrote:

This reminds me of one night years ago when I was casually sitting out
on my lawn looking out over the open fields to my East with a pair of
11x80 binoculars. I saw a glow over the hill which forms my horizon,
and homed in on it to watch the moonrise. I wasn't expecting much, but
when the limb of the moon rose over the hill, it was outright shocking!
Even with the atmospheric distortion, the just past full moon looked
like a giant, three dimensional golf ball rising up behind the hill!

One tends to remember such observations.

On one night I was anxious for a quarter moon to set so I could begin
some deep-sky observing; but the Earth wasn't rotating fast enough to
satisfy me. So, I pointed the telescope at the soon to be setting
moon. The large scale atmospheric turbulence appeared to move in
S-L-O-W motion -- creating another memorable observation.

On a different occasion I couldn't resist 'playing with' a new
apochromat refractor. A few nights earlier I had checked out Venus
(when relatively high in the sky) and noticed no false color; but on
this occasion Jupiter had just made its way above my horizon. I
pointed the scope at Jupiter and was greeted by a sight similar to the
one that started this thread: Adjacent to Jupiter's upper limb was a
blue glow, while the lower limb was adjacent to a red glow. It was
somehow satisfying to use a refractor to observe well-defined,
atmosphere induced, false color!

Now I'm reminded of another truly serendipitous observation: I was
observing Uranus (or was it Neptune?) one evening when I noticed a
'star' that showed some very obvious motion relative to the planet. It
didn't take long for me to realize that the 'moving star' was in
reality neither moving, nor a star. I had stumbled upon a
geosynchronous satellite!
--
Bill
Celestial Journeys
http://cejour.blogspot.com