Tonight: Rumble on the Moon!
Breaking News: Tonight around 20:30 CEST the Japanese moon orbiter Kaguya will be guided to a controlled impact on the lunar surface.
It has been a highly successful, even spectacular, mission: Kaguya/Selene, JAXA's lunar orbiter has reached the end of its orbital lifetime, or, in other words, the last drops of its propellant. With the inherently unstable orbit type, a low polar orbit that crosses both lunar poles during its two-hour period, these two things are essentially equivalent.
It wasn't just its scientific value that set Kaguya apart - this spacecraft had something else, something very special: a HDTV camera, whose high resolution imagery made the viewer feel that he himself was out there, orbiting the moon. This endeared the spacecraft not only to the Japanese and even made it the uncontested star of the Japanese new-year's eve television gala show "Red and White Song Contest".
The predicted impact site will be located at 80 deg E, 63 deg S, near the bottom right hand limb of the visible face. We had a full moon three days ago, so there is a sliver of night along that limb and any explosion flash will show up in telescopes. The best places to view the impact will be (unsurprisingly) Japan, East Asia and Australia.
With the demise of Kaguya there will be a brief interlude where only the Indian spacecraft Chandrayaan-1 remains orbiting the Moon, but Chandrayaan won't feel lonely for long: the next lunar orbiter is already being cleared for launch: NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) will be launched on June 17 and shall survey the Moon for at least one year on a polar orbit at an altitude of only 50 km.
Further Information
Jim Mosher's web site on the Kaguya impact
ESA web site showing images obtained by the now defunct ESA Moon orbiter SMART-1, showing the planned location of the Kaguya impact. Note that the impact location indicated here is now apparently obsolete, earlier predictions had stated a latitude of 64 deg S, which was later changed to 63 deg S.
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The Anglo-Australian Observatory managed to observe the impact flash with a 3.9 meter telescope and an infrared camera. A report by jeremy Bailey is here:
http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/~jbailey/kaguya.html
So far, no other observations have been claimed - and no amateur observazions.