Every amateur astronomer starts off loving the Moon. They eagerly set up their telescopes in their garden, squint into the eyepiece and check what they can see against charts in books or magazines, looking for the ‘celebrity’ lunar features they’ve heard and read so much about. They whisper in the darkness as they make one discovery after another. “Ah… so that’s Copernicus!” “That must be Tycho!” “Wow, they must be the Apennine Mountains.” “Is that… yes, I think it is… the Sea of Tranquility!”
But after a while, the love affair between many new amateur astronomers and the Moon cools. They’ve seen all the ‘good stuff’ – the major craters, the most obvious mountain ranges, the ripples on the floors of the seas, and so on – and the Moon has begun to look, and feel, a bit ‘samey’.
Frustrated with the inhibiting lunar glare, the astronomer begins to actually resent the Moon they had previously loved so much. They turn their back on it and avoid it as much as possible, only going out to observe the night sky when they
