Southern Highlands Home

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

Stevinus
This is an area in the southern highlands with lots of interesting features.  It includes the Rheita valley which is a long valley, probably formed by a string of craters, starting at Rheita in the north and extending south through Young to Young D.  I am not sure if it then continues south to the crater Reimarus.  Hatfield seems to imply that it does not, but the VMA gives the length of the feature as 515 Km which is the distance from Rheita to Reimarus.  But it also makes the comment in its description of Reimarus "Pretty steep slopes supporting a curious lengthened formation to the west".  Inconstant Moon however quotes the length as 230 miles which is 370 Km and a little longer than the length I have indicated.  It also gives the depth as 8500 feet which is 2600 metres.
The large crater Petavius at the top of the picture is bout 3,800 million years old and 180 km in diameter with walls rising to 3300 metres (although the lighting here does not show this well).  Well shown, though, is one of several rimae that cut across the otherwise flat floor; this one extending from the foothills in the south-west to the 1700-metre high central mountain.  The feature Rheita E intrigues me; it appears to be a long, narrow valley but it carries only the crater designation Rheita E.  Stevinus and Snellius form a nice pair;  Stevinus is much the younger of the two at no more than 1,000 million years compared with 3,900 million years for Snellius.

The scale markers are approximately 100 Km north and east and refer to the region around Funerius.  To illustrate how difficult it is to say which way is north, consider the fact that Petavius, Funerius, Reimarus, and Pontecoulant G are all at 60° east longitude.
The picture is a composite of two pictures was taken about 19:10 UT on 14th March 2005 with my EXT125.
Date and Time 14th March 2005 19:10 UT
Camera ToUcam 740K
Telescope ETX125 at prime focus
Capture K3CCDTools. high gamma, 1/100", 36% gain, 321 and 191 frames
Processing Registax. 242 and 60 frames stacked. Wavelets 1,2 = 10 and 3 = 5
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