The seas and craters of the moon are something that you almost never get tired of seeing by telescope. As the moon goes through its phases, the angle of the light is constantly changing and so the rough terrain of the moon seems to continuously change. One of the most interesting things is to see long shadows cast by mountain ranges on the moon cast onto the broad flat seas that were created billions of years ago by cooling lava oceans. The names of the seas and craters are particularly poetic. Check out the moon map below for the names of the most prominant seas and craters.

Lunar Eclipses

If you've never seen a lunar eclipse before, it is a wonderful (and easy) thing to see. Over the course of about two hours, the shadow of the earth passes over the face of the moon. If you look at the moon, you can actually see the curvature of the larger sphere of the Earth. As the moon is almost totally eclipsed, it turns an amazing reddish orange color. The red orange color is due to the Earth's atmosphere scattering the blue rays and passing through the red light to reach the moon. This optical phenomenon works just like a sunset except that from the moon's perspective it is seen all the way around the perimeter of the Earth. Imagine what that must look like from the surface of the moon. Perhaps one day there will be toursists that visit the moon just for the purpose of viewing these events!