Hipparchus

Move your mouse over the picture to see the names of some of the features.  Click here to see a mosaic of six pictures of this area.

Hipparchus is further east than Ptolemaeus and Alphonsus and so the Sun was lower in the lunar sky here than in my pictures of the latter craters taken at the same time.  Fortunately the western walls are quite low so the floor is shown clearly. However this is not true of the smaller crater, Horrocks, whose western walls are particularly high, rising to 3000 metres.  Hipparchus is a very old formation dating from at least 4,000 million years ago.  On the other hand Horrocks is quite young being between 1,000 and 3,000 million years old.   It has a central mountain but this is obscured by the shadows.  Another small crater here, Seeliger, is of similar age and has no central mountain.  Reaumur and Oppolzer are two other old formations that have been flooded with lava from the Sinus Medii after their formation. Two interesting Rimae are visible.  Rima Reaumur is about 45 Km long.  Rima Oppolzer is 115 Km long and appears to pass through the northern wall of Reaumur. The picture was taken with a ToUcam attached to my LX200 with a X2 adaptor lens on 6th September 2004 when the Moon was 21.8 days old.

Date and Time	6th September 2004 04:28 UT
Camera	ToUcam 740K
Telescope	LX200 with X2 lens
Capture	K3CCDTools. High gamma, 1/50", 42% gain, 310 frames
Processing	Registax. 60 frames stacked. Wavelet 1,2 = 10

		Home      Back to SW quadrant	Back to SE quadrant