by Marek Cichanski
I'm definitely coming to believe that when the terminator is in Oceanus Procellarum, that's the cue to break out the Russian optics, mag up, and start redlining the fun meter. This is just such a great area of the moon!
Stared at the Marius Hills until I thought my retina was going to have permanent afterimages of those little bumps on it. I counted 35 domes with distinct shadows, and another 10 or 15 more with indistinct shadows and/or just shading. The Marius Hills were often discussed as a possible landing site for Apollo 18 or 19, if those missions hadn't been cancelled. If only they could have sent Gordon and co. to check those suckers out! Heavy sigh.
Remember the oddly 'convex' floor of Mersenius? Well, there's another slightly odd flooded crater in the same area. The floor of the crater Billy seemed oddly dark in color - and Rukl confirmed it. Could particular batches of lava have erupted only in certain craters? There's a whole funky geological story to be unraveled there. It would involve everything from how the lunar interior partially melted to form the mare basalts, to the evolution of the magmas, to the 'fracture plumbing' that allowed them to reach the surface. If only we could send a whole bunch of geologists up there to sort it out...
Oh, and in the same area is the Flamsteed ring. This is an almost-entirely-buried-by-lava crater, in which Surveyor 1 landed. Matter of fact, this whole part of Procellarum has a number of these almost-gone crater rims, and it's one of the most beautiful things about this region. I feel reasonably stupid that I didn't make a point of picking out the Dorsum Rubey, a wrinkle ridge named for Bill Rubey. He was a geologist with the USGS and later at UCLA, about whom it was said "He was a brilliant generalist, studying the interconnection of geologic phenomena in virtually all the problems he addressed; he brought rigor and quantification to many subjects that hitherto had seemed virtually intractable." This quote is from the 'Rubey Volume' #1, titled "The Geotectonic Development of California", edited by Stanford's current department head, Gary Ernst.
Gave Schroter's Valley and the Cobra Head the good long stare that I had missed earlier in the evening. The Montes Agricola looked really nice, being right on the terminator, paralleling the northwestern margin of the Aristarchus Plateau.
Bopped over to Saturn for a while and gave that a good long stare, too. Isn't it amazing how intently we can look at Saturn? Reminds me of a line from P.J O'Rourke - "he had that picture fixed with a gaze that would make stout Cortez on a peak in Darien look like a blinking, purblind myope." Doesn't that describe us looking at Saturn? He or she who is tired of Saturn is tired of life.
Posted on sf-bay-tac Tue Feb 3 14:37:38 2004 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.0 Tue Feb 3 22:33:36 2004 PT