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THE moon annoys some stargazers. This is especially true when it is full and its light outshines some stars usually visible to the naked eye or prevents meteor showers from giving their best show. But I would like to invite you to embrace the part of the lunar cycle when the moon is at its brightest, which, this month, falls on 5 February. Join me in casting an eye towards our beautiful companion.

The best time to look at the lunar surface isn’t right at the full moon, because the sunlight reflecting off its face can be too bright to see all of its details. You will get a better view a few nights either side, when most of the surface is still visible, but the light isn’t quite so intense.

If you have ever done more than just glance at the moon, you will know it has some fuzzy patches of light and dark. With binoculars or a small telescope, these patches spring into astonishing detail.

The first features we are going to focus on are the lunar maria, which is Latin for seas. They were given this name because early astronomers thought they might be just that – vast areas of water. Although we now know the moon does have some water on its surface, it is probably just in ice form or in individual water molecules within grains of rock.

Instead, these dark areas, which can be seen dotted across the moon’s surface, are stretches of basalt rock formed by volcanoes around 3 billion years ago. They are dark simply because this kind of rock reflects less sunlight.

Next, we will look for some impact craters. The biggest of these are Copernicus, which is a bright, 93-kilometre-wide crater that is roughly in the middle of the moon, as we view it, and Tycho, which appears at the bottom of the moon as seen from the northern hemisphere, and at the top from the southern hemisphere. If you look outwards from the centre of Tycho, you might see some bright streaks. These were caused by material thrown out from the spot of the impact when the crater was created around 108 million years ago.

On the other side of the moon’s face from Tycho, in between two of the biggest lunar maria, there is a curved line that appears slightly brighter than its surroundings. Look closely and you might spot some ridges. This is Montes Apenninus, one of the biggest mountain ranges on the moon. It was created by asteroid impacts about 3.9 billion years ago. In general, the bright patches on the moon’s surface are its highlands, which were mostly put there when something big smashed into it.

If you want a challenge, at very specific times in the lunar cycle, two features become visible thanks to the way sunlight falls on the edges of craters. The lunar X and V look like these letters dotted on the moon’s surface, and can be seen for about 4 hours around the first quarter of the cycle.

Abigail Beall is a features editor at 91av and author of The Art of Urban Astronomy @abbybeall

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