On the Lunar Edge!
Edge of the Southern Lunar Highlands,
Clavius Crater at Bottom…
One of my Sharpest Southern Highlands shots to date!
Craterlets galore! Zoom in a bit to see the tiny craterlets!
The Southern Highlands terrain has many craters larger than 45 km in diameter.
Back in the 1970’s counts have been made of small (km sized) crater
number densities in limited areas of the southern lunar highlands,
in order to investigate the nature of the anomaly for large craters in this area. The anomaly is found to be detectable in this size range also,
supporting the hypothesis of it being of a cometary impact origin.
Lunar Highlands are very different from Maria in more ways than visually obvious.
Radioactive dating of lunar samples of both types of surface tell the same tale as the cratering record: rocks from the highlands are mostly around 4 billion years old, with the oldest being about 4.4 billion years, while maria rocks date
from 3.1 to 3.8 billion years old, about the same as the oldest terrestrial (Earth) rocks.
Captured from my backyard in Dayton on 11-02-2014
QHY5IIL Camera, Prime @ F6.3, 10″ SCT scope
5.6 ms exposures/15 FPS Full Res 1280×960 (3.7micron Pixels)
Best 65% of 600 frames Stacked in Registax 6.
Best Regards,
John Chumack
www.galacticimages.com
