September 16, 2011

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A Big Mystery

LPOD-Sept16-11.jpg
image by Jocelyn Sérot, France

There are two mysteries here, one easy and the other quite difficult. First, what part of the Moon does this image show? The second is, what is the origin of the large mountain at left center? On the Moon nearly all of the hills and holes in the ground are created by impact craters and basins. A large feature like this mountain is likely to be related to a basin, perhaps an isolated fragment of a once significant basin ring. You really need to see a more regional view of this area to evaluate that likelihood but I've looked and it is not obvious that this mountain, called XXXX Beta on Beer and Madler's classic map, is related to any basin. I checked Paul Spudis' map of basin rings for this area and he doesn't have any ring passing through this massif. So we are back to the question, what is the origin of this mountain?

Chuck Wood

Technical Details
8" newtonian, 3x Televue Barlow, red filter, PLA-Mx cam. Processing: registax6 (500 fr/6000).

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