InOMN - 18 Septembre 2010

It's INTERNATIONAL OBSERVE the MOON NIGHT. If you've waited past Civil Twilight, the ancient angular momentum in Earth's rotation is catching up once again with our Moon. Waxing Gibbous, it appears much like it did 886 days ago, when Jocelyn Sérot captured this image. If it's been a while since you looked up, really looked up, AT the Moon, you may need to be reminded of some basic facts. If so, don't feel bad. Everyone tends to ignore beauty in their own backyard, and the Moon is patient. No one is poor who has such adornment framed by an apartment window, a wide meadow or a skyline, a soup line or a battlefield [LPOD/ILUJ/Jocelyn Sérot].

It's not Full, and there's no eclipse. What can you actually "observe" on the Moon, tonight?

Like Galileo, you can surprise yourself. Even modest magnification will delight the eye and allow a better view of the Moon's depth of field. You may need to remind yourself of the Moon's true distance. From limb to limb, it's diameter is equal to the distance from New York City to Las Vegas, for example, and it's almost thirty Earth-diameters away (a lot further than it looks).

Take a look at the richer field below, taken from within the mosaic above, specifically at the southwestern side, near the terminator. It's early morning on the Moon there, and because the shadows are long, some very subtle features that are ordinarily invisible at this distance (and sometimes harder to see up close) come into view now, and again briefly two weeks from now at local evening, when, unfortunately for most, the Moon will rise in the wee hours before dawn.

Like the Moon itself, there's more to the full-globe mosaic by Jocelyn Sérot than immediately meets the eye. The original combination of hundreds of exposures resulted in a detailed "observation," better than the best photographs taken through large telescopes just a few decades ago. Forget the easy stuff, the gestalt of huge mountains and rays for a moment and look again at the close-up, immediately above.

At dead center is a "ghost crater," where a ring of worn mountains are all that remain of a once-proud and craggy crater long ago overrun with molten material. Immediately to it's west is one of the Moon's many low-lying "domes."

Dome Kies Pi presents a very smooth low profile above the mare plain. It's best seen right now, while early morning shadows are long.

Need a better look? Thanks to the WAC Preview program written by Ron Evans, an outstanding contributor to Charles A. Wood's Lunar Picture of the Day forum, there are no better views available than this LROC Wide Angle Camera image. (Oh, I should remind you that LRO is "up there," too, by the way. By tomorrow afternoon, it will have orbited the Moon 5,700 times.)

That ghost crater is easy enough to cross-reference with the smaller-scale pictures, further up. But we're almost too close to really "see" this dome, looking through the LRO camera. The gentle rise of the dome, visible even in low power telescopes if you know where and when to look, is probably best "appreciated" from an aesthetics view, moving out into the backyard and tracing out the landmarks in finding it on the very face of the Moon [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

Here's a look downward again only an orbit later, when LRO traveled a little more directly overhead. More accurately put, the Moon continued rotating under the LRO's polar orbit, allowing the spacecraft a complete data-picture of the Moon over time.

A little later that same month, here's the same area in late afternoon illumination. Can you spot Dome Kies Pi?

Blogger's Best for the Best

Now this illustrates well a singular disadvantage to blogspot, i.e. "Google Blogger," as a format for our purposes at Lunar Pioneer. All our best image work has to be literally tricked to stay within a 400 pixel width. We manage twice that number in height only by first uploading the maximum such image through Picassa and grabbing the code to then cut and paste it into the HTML. Through nearly 2000 postings we've learned to point elsewhere or to count on Google deciding for us to reproduce a lossy duplicate, which amounts to a mockery of the original. Our solution, then, is to stay within those bounds with the best possible duplicate of our own.

Above, in miniature, is a ridiculous thumbnail which at best merely advertises a typically glorious mosaic of the well-known Near Side craters Atlas and Hercules, along with Burg, on the left centered within Lacus Mortis.

Among the top ten master lunar photographers is Wes Higgins, whose work is prominent among those appropriately honored by Charles Wood as a Lunar Picture of the Day.

He was kind enough to post a link to the larger image to the Lunar Observer's Group on Saturday. Below is the best slice of the image he submitted that we could reproduce, and we leave it to you to compare it with the thumbnail above.

The lunar south, up close and personal

To call this image by George Tarsoudis a Thumbnail is a world-class understatement. But the original, shared with the Yahoo lunar observers group, is not great simply because it is large and comprehensive, it's also a high quality mosaic put together from only two video stills captured on November 26.

It's not the most impressive "amateur" image of the Moon's south polar region, but it's well worth a closer look perhaps because of the difficulties Tarsoudis encounters, including "turbulence," to contend with a week ago. He took "very short videos," he wrote, "three hundred to four hundred frames only."

"Some very interesting craters to see," in the image, Tarsoudis wrote, are the increasingly familiar Malapert Massiff, Moretus, Short, and the more elusive (from Earth) Shoemaker, Faustini and Amundsen."

Two Lunar Images

One favorite test of earth-perspective lunar mosaics is the treatment offered of the Descartes Formation, the anomalously bright albedo over the unusual segmented ridges between the landing site of Apollo 16 and Descartes C, north (up) and west of center in the image above.

However you might like to marvel at superior amateur "whole-Moon" mosaics, Xiao Sun has just uploaded two moderately sized examples of work by Mike White at "The Imaging Source," the "Astronomy Cameras Blog" collected early on the morning (UT) of November 7.

The image above is cropped from the 7.5 day-old Moon, showing the rich terrain of the low latitude southern highlands.

Detail from the second of Mark White's outstanding mosaics showing the general location of the Descartes Formation and the magnetic anomaly associated with southern highland regolith of "low optical maturity," or swirl centered near the north rim of the ancient Descartes crater.

World Record Moon Mosaic 2009

For scale, the large impact on the south rim of Descartes,
Descartes A, is about 10 kilometers across.

Hat Tip to Chuck Wood at LPOD for his comparison first of Copernicus with what only looks like a garden-variety, good but not especially extraordinary telescopic image of the Moon. Instead, surfing to my personal favorite, the lunar swirl and magnetic anomaly the Descartes Formation, reveals a fantastic mosaic, the world's largest, which simply has to be experienced, HERE.

(Expect a response from the Miracle Mosaic Makers from AstronoMinsk)