Wrinkle Ridges of Mare Serenitatis

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

This is the landing site of Apollo 17, the last of the manned landings on the Moon.   The Taurus mountains are largely in shadow but the low angle of the Sun brings out the ridges (dorsa) in the south-eastern part of the Mare Serenitatis.  Dorsa are wrinkle ridges, in the lava that flood the basins and are only metres high and so show up best when the terminator is near, as in this picture.  The picture shows only about half of the Dorsa Smirnov, otherwise known as the Serpentine Ridge (a better name really; Smirnov was a Russian naturalist of the 20th century and why he should be immortalised on the Moon is not clear to me).  It extends north as far as Posidonius and is 135 Km long.  The highest point coincides with the small crater Very but even there it is only a hundred metres or so high. It may be part of a ring of ridges that encircle Mare Serenitatis, but which are almost impossible to image in a single exposure (see my picture of Mare Serenitatis).  Dorsa Aldrovandri (also a naturalist but 16th century this time) is another such ridge close to the mountains. The scale markers are approximately 100 Km north and west. The picture was taken with a ToUcam attached to my LX200 on 23rd September 2005 at 02:38 UT, when the Moon was 20.1 days old.

Date and Time	23rd September 2005 at 03:38 UT
Camera	ToUcam 740K
Telescope	LX200 with IR-pass filter
Capture	K3CCDTools. Low gamma, 1/25", 64% gain, 463 frames
Processing	Registax. 78 frames stacked. Wavelets 1 = 10, 2 = 5, gamma 1.2, histogram 33-255

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