Piccolomini

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

The VMA describes Piccolomini as "an isolated circular formation", but there are a lot of features round about it.  The most notable feature is the Altai Scarp, which is the best-displayed section of the outer ring of the Nectaris Basin  Piccolomini itself is a 90-Km crater with a central mountain sporting four peaks.  The walls are 4,500 metres high and steep enough that the western wall appears to have broken free and slumped down onto the floor.  This area is just to the south-west of Mare Nectaris, and Apollo 16 landed about 800 Km to the north-west of here where they found an area of debris ejected from the formation of craters.  This area looks very similar. The scale markers are approximately 100 Km north and west. The picture was taken with a ToUcam attached to my LX200 on 10th Sepember 2006, when the Moon was 18.4 days old.

Date and Time	10th September 2004 22:07 UT
Camera	ToUcam 740K
Telescope	LX200 at prime focus
Capture	K3CCDTools. High gamma, 1/250", 11% gain, 462 frames
Processing	Registax. 18 alignment points, 461 frames stacked. Wavelets 1-2 = 10, gamma 1.3, contrast 130, brightness -34

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