Aristarchus

Captured on August 6, 2006 by negative projection through my Celestron C8, 2.5x Powermate, moon filter and ToUcam using K3ccdtools. Stacked in Registax with wavelets and cropped and saved for the web on Photoshop CS2. Resolution is about 400m per pixel.

Aristarchus of course dominates this image -  the bright 40km diameter crater in the bottom right displays its central peak and some terracing on the 3000m high crater walls. Above Aristarchus lies Herodotus, a 35km diameter flooded crater. To the left of Herodotus is the 160 km long Vallis Schroteri, or Schroter's Valley. Vallis Schroteri is the largest sinuous valley on the moon, and ranged up to 10kms wide and 1000m deep. It is believed to have been formed by lava flows when the moon was volcanic.

Just left of bottom centre of the image is the horizontal shadow of Rupes Toscanelli, a fault of about 70kms length. Surrounding Rupes Toscanelli are several rilles collectively known as Rimae Aristarchus making this area of the moon particularly interesting.