I just finished reading The Modern Moon: A Personal View by planetary geologist Charles A. Wood, and felt compelled to write a few lines about this genuinely brilliant book. I have been practicing amateur astronomy for the past 17 years, and have occasionally looked at the moon through various telescopes. But for some reason, our natural satellite has always failed to captivate my attention. I suppose you don’t take interest in what you fail to understand. Moreover, telescopic views of the moon are overwhelming with details, making it hard to decipher what you are looking at. Wood’s book brings order to chaos and does a great job at explaining the science behind some of the surface features of the moon. For this reason, I warmly recommend anybody even remotely interested in lunar geology to read this book. Observers will want to complement it with a good lunar atlas, such as Antonin Rukl’s Atlas of the Moon.
Julien – I am pleased that you enjoyed my book! It is what I wanted to read when I first started observing the Moon, but it didn’t exist. I have a website – Lunar Photo of the Day (http://lpod.wikispaces.com/) that tries to marry fantastic images (mostly by amateurs) with geologic (or historic) commentary. I think of LPOD as a daily update to the book.
Good observing,
Chuck Wood