The Alpine Valley

Move your mouse over the picture to see the names of some of the features.

	This is a close view of the Alpine Valley and the narrow rille down the centre of the valley can just be seen. The valley is 150 Km long by 8 Km wide and is remarkably straight. Down the centre of the valley is a narrow rill only 0.17 arc sec wide which corresponds to about 700 metres on the Moon. It is remarkable to be able to resolve this with a 254 mm telescope. The picture was taken with a ToUcam attached to my LX200 with a X2 adaptor lens on 1st March 2004, a night of exceptional seeing, when the Moon was 9.7 days old. Small craters are named after a nearby large crater with A, B, etc, appended. In this case the two small craters labelled A and B are in fact Egede A and Egede B. Date and Time: 1st March 2004 19:59 UT Camera: ToUcam 740K Telescope: LX200 with X2 lens Capture: K3CCDTools. High gamma, 1/50", 12% gain, 547 frames Processing: Registax. 100 frames stacked. Wavelet 2-3 = 5 Histogram 117-210
	And here is the Alpine Valley at sunset.  The valley runs north-east to south-west so the Sun almost shines along the valley as it sets.  At this scale there are not many named features;  my sources don't give names for many of the mountains on the Moon. The picture was taken with a ToUcam attached to my LX200 with a X2 adaptor lens on 6th September 2004, when the Moon was 20.8 days old. Date and Time: 6th September 2004 04:12 UT Camera: ToUcam 740K Telescope: LX200 with X2 lens Capture: K3CCDTools. High gamma, 1/50", 23% gain, 301 frames Processing: Registax. 85 frames stacked. Wavelet 1,2 = 10
	And here is the Alpine Valley at sunrise.  There is a shadow across the valley (just above the "l" of "Alpes").  Examination of other pictures seems to indicate that there is a step in the floor of the valley at that point, so this shadow may be the shadow of that step implying that the eastern end of the valley is higher than the western end.  (It is. See below.) The scale markers are approximately 50 Km north and east. The picture was taken with a ToUcam attached to my LX200 with a X2 adaptor lens on 19th December 2004, when the Moon was 8.4 days old. Date and Time: 19th December 2004 18:24 UT Camera: ToUcam 740K Telescope: LX200 with X2 lens Capture: K3CCDTools. High gamma, 1/50", 25% gain, 331 frames Processing: Registax. 48 frames stacked. Wavelets 1-4 = 10, gamma 1.3, contrast 70
	Now that Lunar Orbiter Altimeter data is available I can see the elevation of the valley floor across my shadow.  This is the plot running from West to East with the horizontal scale in kilometres and the vertical in metres below datum.  It clearly shows an increase in elevation of about 200 metres over a distance of about 4 Km but that this happens in two stages with a 2 Km flat area between two steep slopes. June 2019

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