BAA & ALPO LUNAR TRANSIENT PHENOMENA PROGRAM

SUMMARY OF REPORTED OBSERVATIONS

Apollo 8 photograph 

Your observations are important and used in the ongoing study of Lunar Transient Phenomena.  The summary for each months observations sent to me or Dr. Anthony Cook are posted along with Dr. Cook comments concerning the observation.

To check the summary for each months observation and the observing schedule for upcoming lighting conditions you can click "here".

Once you are at this web site you can also click on the hyperlink that will take you to the previous months observations.

When you submit your observations you can use my L.T.P. Report form on line and fill in the blanks that pertain to you. Some of the fields such as albedo or photometry, etc., you may not need to fill in, so if they do not pertain to you just don't click on them. The form will not submit what not filled in. This form is located the left column of my web page. I had generated this reporting form before the B.A.A and A.L.P.O. had combined their Lunar Transient Phenomena program. You may alternatively use the observing forms generated by the B.A.A. (primarily intended for European observers, but may be freely adapted by US observers). These consist of two versions: 1) the "routine form" for regular checks on the Moon, and 2) the "detailed report form" where you may wish to include a sketch or a detailed description of a routine observation or an L.T.P. event during an alert.

I also want to inform you that Dr. Anthony Cook has an extremely
interesting observing program going on and I want to encourage you to become part of it. What it consist of is the viewing of historical L. T. P. sites that have been published in the NASA L. T. P. Catalog put together by Winifred S. Cameron. This catalog has over 1463 events recorded in it. They cover a time span from 500 AD to 28 May 1977. What Dr. Cook provides is a computer generated schedule of when lighting conditions for these specific events are being duplicated. The key to this observing program is to see if similar phenomena is seen during the observing session. If the observers see similar phenomena it would indicate that it not a true lunar transient event but just the normal appearance of the lunar formation under this lighting condition. Your observations to this program are very important and will help determine the true nature of this phenomena.

To find what lunar features you should observe for the present month you can check Current Suggested Observing - note that this is a very large document and you should print out only the pages for your geographical location and the descriptions of L.T.P. at the end of the document.

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