June 2, 2012
The Moon's Mvf
<img src="" alt="LPOD-Jun2-12.jpg" title="LPOD-Jun2-12.jpg" />
image by Jordi Ortega
Volcanoes are my second love. I have tramped around many of them, especially active ones, in various countries and continents and even written a book about the North American ones. The Moon has vast volcanic lava plains - the maria - but mostly only puny volcanic mountains. Earth has a lot more diversity volcanologically, but telescopic views of lunar volcanoes can be a challenge that is fun too. Domes are the best known lunar volcanoes, and every telescopic volcano hunter should include the Arago, Hortensius and Kies domes in their bucket list. And there are rare steep-sided volcanoes such as Mairan T that are small and hard to observe examples of lunar volcanoes. But perhaps the most Earth-like lunar volcanoes are the Marius Hills that are very similar to monogenetic volcanic fields (MVF). The Marius Hills contain about 300 little cones - see the lovely conical shadow of a few of them? - that are almost unique on the Moon, certainly their great concentration is. A few of the cones are gently sloping domes but most are steeper sided and coated with what appears spectroscopically to be volcanic cinders. A few lava channels cut through and partially surround the volcanic field, whose lavas - nicely seen near the top of the image - build up a very broad low mountain that the cones cluster on. This is very similar in many ways - hundreds of cones and a few domes, lava channels and a lava flow base - to MVFs, specifically the San Francisco Volcanic Field north of Flagstaff, Arizona. One of the things that field mapping has shown about the 700 SFVF cones is that it did not erupt all at the same time - there is an age progression from west to east, from about 6 million years to a thousand years old. The same may be true for the Marius Hills.
Chuck Wood
Technical Details
S/C Celestrón 11" HD F 25 + Baader Ir pass filter + DMK 21 618 cámera. Software, Registax6 and Astroart 5.
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Rükl plate 29
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