Taking Pictures of the Moon

Now that the observatory is working reliably I decided it was time to try out the cameras.   I decided to keep it simple for the first few images in order to avoid too many frustrations with remembering how to get all the equipment working so I took some greyscale images of the moon:

Here the prominent crater with the large central peak is Theophilus. I love the "pearls in space" effect of the sun on the mountain peaks below the main crater along the terminator (the line separating night and day) but I am most intrigued by the subtle relief features in the upper right.   The dark patches on the moon are known as Mare (latin for sea) as they were thought to resemble or even possibly be seas of water.  These days we understand them to be vast planes of volcanic lava, those relief features only become visible to us when the terminator is very close by and we can see shadows being cast across the surface.   What we are looking at here are volcanic domes and wrinkle ridges left behind as the lava cooled. I will be looking to find out more about those features and perhaps make more detailed studies at a later date.

I also took this image further along the terminator:

This is the western part of the sea of serenity with crater Posidonius prominent at the top of the frame (some of its rilles are visible too which I am pleased about), the striking snake like feature is "the great sinuous ridge" or Dorsa Smirnov.  This is an example of a wrinkle ridge which form when the lava that formed the Mare cool and contract, some of these features can extended for many hundreds of kilometres across the moons surface.

It is very easy when studying the moon to get distracted by the impact craters, they tend to be large, bright and dramatic but they don't tell you much about the moon itself.  The craters are the result of foreign objects hitting the moon but the volcanic features: the domes, the wrinkle ridges, the cinder cones and rilles tell the story of the dynamic moon that was, how she formed and cooled. So to me the more subtle features are the more fascinating to examine.