The Lunar Doughnut

Alan Adler alerted PAS members to this feature: an ephemeral ring of light near the crater Rheita, which appears at most a few times a year.

These images were taken on 1/6/2003 between 17:45 and 18:25 PST using an Olympus C2020 digital camera handheld to the eyepiece of a Takahashi FS128. Eyepieces were a 15mm Panoptic, a 7mm Nagler and a 9mm Vixen. Since the telescope is a refractor, images are reversed from the normal view.