Mare Marginis to Mare Smythii Home

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

This is a mosaic of three pictures covering an area of the far eastern limb under favorable libration (3° 51' in longitude).  
Mare Marginis is possibly one of the oldest mare on the Moon.  The dark areas to its west have no official name and were called Lacus Risus Felis by Charles Wood in his book The Modern Moon following a comment from E.A. Whitaker that it looks like the smile on the face of the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland (unfortunately I have just missed much of the right eye).  Also in this area there are a number of lava-flooded craters.  Neper with its ridge-like central mountain is nicely shown here;  to the north of Mare Marginis is the 90 Km crater Goddard.
Mare Smythii fills another ancient impact basin centred at 87° E and so only visible with favourable librations.  The basin is approximately circular and dates from the early days of the Moon (more than 4,000 million years ago).  It has been flooded with lava at least twice, the older lava being heavily cratered and indistinct, but the northern part of the mare is darker and much less heavily cratered so must be much younger (less than 2,000 million years).  This diversity is visible in my image as the impact basin extends from the dark patch surrounding Peek right down to the crater Kiess, and the general outline of the western rim can be seen.  The eastern rim is probably over the limb;  it is tempting to interpret the bright edge as the eastern rim (and the irregular form supports that interpretation), but the brightness has been exagerated by the image processing.
One scale marker indicates approximately 100 Km north, the other points along the lunar equator and is of no particular length.
The picture was taken with a ToUcam attached to my LX200 on 10th December 2005 around 17:20 UT, when the Moon was 9.8 days old.
Date and Time 10th December 2005 17:20 UT
Camera ToUcam 740K
Telescope LX200 at prime focus with IR-pass filter
Capture K3CCDTools. Low gamma, 1/33", 10% gain
Processing Registax. Wavelets 1-2 = 10, histogram 30-255 
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