As a child I always treasured a close relationship to my Dad’s father, whom I loved to call Grampa (misspelling deliberate) Willie. Our closeness began during a visit in 1959 or 1960, when we both took his apartment building elevator to the roof. On that unforgettable evening we both looked through binoculars at the Sun, which had not quite set. There and then we enjoyed a large group of sunspots on the Sun. A few years later, when he was away from his apartment, I went again to that roof to look for Comet Ikeya-Seki, the Great Comet of 1965. I wrote earlier about my visit to him in early 1967, the night he decided to purchase for me the 15cm f/4 richest field reflector which to this day is a telescope I use every clear night, and which is named Minerva.

After he died in 1973, I very much wanted a painting hanging on the wall of my grandfather’s living room. To this day I am not certain of who the artist was, although the signature was close to that of the French painter Charles-François Daubigny. I knew it as “Grampa’s pond” since it reminded me of the pond at his cottage at Jarnac, near Ripon, Quebec, which I have visited hundreds of times and after which Jarnac Observatory is named. I also know that the artist painted it on a humid day, as the painting shows a hint of a distant mountain hidden in haze.

I brought the painting with me when I settled in southern Arizona in 1979. On a return drive years later I was able to add the antique frame in which the painting was housed. Not long ago I tried to read the artist’s name as Charles-François Daubigny, though the signature does not quite match. However, the pond matches fairly closely the ponds and riverbanks in France that he loved to paint over and over again.

Daubigny apparently also loved painting the Moon, and although Grampa’s painting does not show it, the artist has many evening pond paintings that do. To add to his selenographic love, I offer a lunar map I created in 1964 (I was 16 then) out of a Sky & Telescope lunar map that included numbered craters and lettered mountain ranges. My completion of the map on July 26, 1964, by the way, led a few weeks later to amateur astronomer David Zackon’s lending me his 8-inch f/7 reflector (which I named Pegasus). Dad later purchased the telescope from him, and on 11 October 1987 I discovered my third comet, C/1987 T1, with it.

I will probably never know if Daubigny was the artist who painted the pond, or if it was another artist with a similar style. But I do know that there is a connection between me and the artist in that we both thoroughly enjoy the Moon. He loved painting it, just as I relish the tens of thousands of happy guises I have caught over more than half a century of moongazing. By far the easiest thing in the sky to find with almost any telescope, the Moon never disappoints. Just as it is a place on which twelve people have hiked and countless spacecraft have explored, it thoroughly rewards anyone who takes a few moments to take a deep breath, open an eye, and appreciate the splendor of the Moon’s soft, commanding, and enchanted luster.