Moon over 55%
Moonlight
Bright nights used properly: lunar terminator, planets, narrowband.
- Length
- 4 hours
- Places
- 8
- Available
- 14 nights / month
- Price
- $95
Fourteen nights a month the moon is bright enough to make deep-sky work pointless. Most observatories treat those nights as lost. We sell them as their own thing, because a 610 mm mirror on the lunar terminator at high magnification is one of the most startling sights available from the ground and nobody books it on purpose.
The session follows the terminator — the line between lunar day and night, where the shadows are longest and the relief is extreme. Craters that are invisible at full moon have kilometre-deep shadows two days either side of first quarter.
Sombra runs narrowband in parallel, which is genuinely unaffected by moonlight, so there is imaging to look at between visual turns.
What it is pointed at
Altitudes below are computed for this observatory at local midnight on the reference night in the calendar. An object below about 30° is looking through too much atmosphere to be worth the time.
| Target | Catalogue | Mag | Altitude | Bearing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Omega CentauriThe largest globular in the sky. At 610 mm it resolves to the core and stops looking like a cluster at all. | NGC 5139 | 3.9 | 32° | 228° SW |
| Jewel BoxColour contrast survives moonlight, which is why it appears on the Moonlight target list. | NGC 4755 | 4.2 | 28° | 213° SW |