Move your mouse over the picture to see the names of the various features.
Mare Serenitatis is 303,000 square kilometre basin formed by a massive impact
3,870 million years ago and was flooded with lavas 150 million years later.
We know these dates because the Apollo-17 astronauts brought back samples of the rocks and
lava from this basin. Impact basins produce concentric rings of mountains, but these are
difficult to see in Serenitatis because of the flooding with lava and later impacts.
The Haemus mountains are about the only relict of the original outer ring which
continues through the Apollo-17 landing site and the crater Posidonius. The inner
ring appears only as wrinkle ridges of which Smirnov (or the Serpentine Ridge) is
clearly visible. (Click on the picture to return to the darker picture.)
The scale markers are approximately 200 Km north and east.
The picture was taken with a ToUcam attached to my LX200 on 23rd September 2005 at 03:11 UT,
when the Moon was 20.1 days old.
Date and Time
23rd September 2005 at 03:11 UT
Camera
ToUcam 740K
Telescope
LX200 with 0.33 focal reducer and IR-pass filter
Capture
K3CCDTools. Low gamma, 1/33", 17% gain, 380 frames
Processing
Registax. 185 frames stacked. Wavelet 1 = 10, 2 = 5, gamma 1.7
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