December 14, 2009

Brittannia

image by Pavel Presnyakov, Kiev Ukraine

What a dramatic view - looking across 400 km of lava flows towards sunset. Crisium is a pretty undisturbed surface, cut by only a handful of craters, and wrinkled by a few mare ridges. Why are there no sinuous rilles or domes? Craters named for two financial supporters of great observatories - Lick and Yerkes - stick up from a shallow bench on the outer edge of Crisium and are surrounded and flooded by later lavas. Strong structural signatures of a broadened northern rim are conspicuous on the left, but strangely, all the rest of the basin's multiple rings are poorly expressed. Why is the boundary between mare and rim so amazingly linear, but on the south side it is highly jagged? The elongation of the mare to the east and the break in the rim in that direction suggest an obliquie impact origin, with the projectile coming from the west.

Chuck Wood

Technical Details
06.10.2009 00:37 UT. 350 mm newtonian + barlow 5x Vac-135, b/w 1280x1024, 250 frames from 3000 in AviStack and Registax. Three frame mosaic.

Related Links
Rükl plates 26, 27, 37 & 38,
Full res version
Pavel's gallery

Yesterday's LPOD: Geo Textbook

Tomorrow's LPOD: Not the Aurora

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