More on the Moon Take 2 … and more to come, probably

Continuing image processing from the 7^th, the following image is from further “up” the terminator.

Reiner Gamma and Kepler

I've marked 2 areas that I think are interesting. First, the crater Kepler, pointed to with the arrow. It's about 31 miles in diameter. I find the rays, ejecta actually, to be the interesting aspect. The ones to the left are quite long, reaching almost to the 2^nd area of interest, Reiner Gamma, the circled area. I wonder if the sparsity of ejecta on the right side of the crater means that the object that hit the moon there was traveling from right to left, more or less. I also wonder what caused the “jaggedness” of the rays. I would think they would be straighter. Is it just an illusion caused by the terrain?

Renier Gamma is something that has puzzled astronomers for 50 years or so, apparently. First identified as a crater by Francesco Maria Grimaldi and named Galilaeus by Giovanni Riccioli. IF, and that's another big if, I'm reading Virtual Moon Atlas correctly, the name Reiner Gamma was not adopted until 1935. However, what it is remains a mystery. It's called a lunar swirl, which I think is meant to be more of a descriptive name than anything else. It has the interesting characteristic of having a very strong localized magnetic field, as shown in this overlay map from the Quickmap reference below. The red area is around Reiner Gamma, the red indicating the strong magnetic field.

Magnetic field around Reiner Gamma

One of the theories of why it looks like it does, meaning lighter in”color”, is that the magnet field has not allowed the weathering of the solar wind that has occurred around it, darkening the surrounding area. All in all, this has been one of the more interesting rabbits I've chased in a long time. The moon is still an interesting place to study.