LRO and the Moon

I kept checking after sunset tonight to try to get my first glimpse of the Moon after LRO's LOI, but clouds covered all but a small strip of sky along the horizon. It wasn't until late (9:43 PM EDT, to be exact) that I finally spotted it in that strip from my mom's apartment window. I called my colleague Scott Walling (manning the flight software station in the LSR) to tell him to look for it when he went off shift at 10, and then we went outside to get a better view for ourselves and talked for a while.
If I'd thought ahead, I would've asked my Flight Dynamics colleagues where LRO was in its orbit at particular times. There's no chance of seeing it, but it's cool to have a rough idea of where it should be while you're looking at the Moon. I do know that LRO is orbiting the Moon counter-clockwise as we currently see it. The orbit (as of tonight) takes it as close as about 120 miles above the south pole, and as far as a thousand above the north. That would be about half the width of the lunar disk away from the northern edge.
As is often the case when the Moon is a crescent, we could faintly see some of the surface features on its night side. That's caused by Earthlight. A nearly full Earth (four times larger than the Moon appears in our sky) is shining in the Moon's (and LRO's) sky now, with only a sliver of darkness along its eastern edge. (The phase of Earth's disk as seen from the Moon is always a mirror image of the Moon's phase as we see it, with light and dark areas reversed.)