Friday, March 13, 2020

A Curious Sight on the Moon

The evening of March 7th, the last evening with no clouds, I imaged portions of the moon. As usual for me, I “ran the terminator”, meaning imaging along the day/night line. Plus a little extra this time. Needing something to do while the skies are so cloudy , I'm still processing the images. The first one processed, however, has something I don't remember seeing, so I'm trying to find out more about it. It's one of those things that's certainly nothing, but I'm just curious. I'm also asking members of the Atlanta Astronomy Club to look at the images to see if anyone recognizes it. First, the processed image.

  
Original processed image, but substantially downsized.

And now, the curious feature marked.

Feature is slanted lines inside circle. Ray from Tycho is vertical line.


The “feature”, for lack of a better word, seems to be a series of light lines at an angle to one of the rays of ejecta from the crater Tycho. In tracking this down, I've been to the lunar quickmap
to see if any of the layers might shed some light on the feature, but nothing seems to have helped. I feel fairly confident that it is not a surface feature like a crater rim or wrinkle ridge, so I'm thinking it might be ejecta from another crater, maybe??? Who knows? Maybe somebody. IF, and that's a big if, it is ejecta, which crater did it come from?

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