Steve’s Virtual Planet

The Lunar 100

If you are on a mission to discover our Moon and your looking for a detailed observing guide, one of the best ones to start with is Charles Woods, Lunar 100. For a number of years now, Charles has written a frequent column about the moon in Sky and Telescope magazine. He came up with this list of 100 favorite objects and published them in 2004. It’s a great reference and the resources below will get you started.

The revised Sky and Telescope reference article is on this page, but there is also a Lunar 100 page on Wikipedia. The table in the second link is easier to work with and has many of the objects hyperlinked for further study. However, the S&T article has the Rukl chart reference number for most of the objects. Antonin Rukl’s Atlas of the Moon is one of the definitive books with all hand drawn maps that are indexed.  There is a useful wiki reference on the web if you can’t find his book. For a printed hold-in-your-hand quide, Shop at Sky has a nice laminated reference on a card. I’ll have more on the Rukl Atlas in a future post.