Some lunar vistas – September 19, 2014

Finally, after an extremely long period of basically no lunar imagery for me, I’m re-learning the once normal procedure of getting my scope to the car, drive 6 kilometers to an empty field, and freeze a few hours (in some months) until the Sun rises…

This is what I’ve finally decided to do on a rather cold September morning (only 6 degrees Celsius at sunrise), to “revisit” the Moon with my C11 SCT.

All of the following images were acquired with the C11, a TeleVue 2x Powermate, Baader Red CCD filter and the ASI120MM mono camera. The seeing was variable, with a mean value of around 6/10, with some excellent moments but also with some truly boiling images at times.

Yet the best thing about this morning was the rather rare aspect (rare for those observers who don’t get up very early in the morning, including myself) of Sinus Iridum. The following image, which for the purpose of enhancing it’s subject I will entitle it “the T-Rex smile”, is a mosaic of four images, each a 900 frames stack.

The image shows some interesting details on the floor of Sinus Iridum, including a ridge and something that looks like a rima. Speaking about rimae, there is one crossing the upper part of the image, being one of the longest on the Moon actually, but not so obvious in my image: Rima Sharp.

There are also some abrupt variations of the relief surrounding Sinus Iridum, from the smooth mare lavas to the apparently abrupt edges of this large lunar feature. The most striking details are in my opinion the knives-tips shadows inside Iridum, they surely give a 3d effect to the entire scene.

Another view of Iridum from a few moments after the above mosaic was acquired, with a slightly higher gain setting to better show the details on it’s floor:

This second image was selected as the LPOD for September 22, 2014.

And another region that I like a lot, being one full of rimae and interesting craters, including one of the most remarkable large craters with it’s floor full of rimae: Gassendi. The image is a two-frame mosaic, each a stack of 2000 frames in 5-6/10 seeing.

Max

(September 19 and 25, 2014)