Catching Clavius

It's supposed to be getting cloudy so I got up just after sunup again to catch the last quarter over the roof of the garage from the driveway. L6 (tycho), and L9 (Clavius) were both easy to find. Moretus, south of Clavius, was almost as interesting, and I was able to make out Rutherford and Porter, the 'ears' of Clavius. Also visible were Clavius C and D and possibly Clavius N although it was small and might be a different small crater. There were two largish prominent craters between Clavius and Moretus but I wasn't able to identify them from my sketch. Tycho was obvious but I was not able to identify the pattern of craters east of Tycho from my sketch. The view near the terminator was interesting but sufficiently different from the VMA image that it was hard to identify features. I was pretty sure I found Montes Appenines (L4) but since the only part lit was the peaks, they looked quite a bit different from previous observations! The promised clouds arrived on schedule and I had to shut down about 7:30 am.
I finally installed 'Starry Nights' software today. I've been holding off since it is a disk hog at almost 600 MB compared to my old faithful Ciel at 86 MB. There are some nice animation features though that might be fun to play with. The animation of satellites was cute as was the animation of the whole universe. Judy was impressed. I haven't found it as useful as ciel as a reference though, probably because I don't know how to use it. I fully expect to run into a multitude of 'incentives' to upgrade, so I haven't been willing to spend a lot of time with it. It may be interesting to load up at home on the desktop. It's particularly interesting to watch the stars fly by while geosyncronous satellites stay fixed in space. 'Magnify' zooms in for a photo of the satellite! I haven't found a way to limit star visibility though and that might be problematic for my light poluted viewing location in south Texas. There's also a way to substitute a panoramic image of your viewing location to use as the horizon but I haven't found a way to do it yet. That may be one of the 'upgrade incentives'. Enough for now, it's supper time.