Huygens Sword (Bruce Rohrlach)

Contains: Solar system body or event

Huygens Sword

Acquisition type: Electronically-Assisted Astronomy (EAA, e.g. based on a live video feed)

Huygens Sword

Acquisition type: Electronically-Assisted Astronomy (EAA, e.g. based on a live video feed)

It’s great to spend a night imaging again after work travel and bad weather.

The lunar seeing last night was awesome.

This is Huygen’s Sword – the Blade and Handle are labelled.

Without doubt Hugyen’s Sword is the absolute best example of a lunar fault.

North is down the page. Huygen’s Sword is a 120-km-long fault scarp that slices through the eastern shores of Mare Nubium (“Sea of Clouds”) with a west-side-down throw on the linear fault scarp. If you look closely, extending downward from the small Birt crater is another smaller 50-km-long rille called Rima Birt, which is either a curving fissure or a collapsed lava tube, which ends in two small pits at either end. An even fainter rille can be seen off-set from the bottom-right end of this rille commencing around the location of the southern pit terminus of Rima Birt.

The handle of the sword comprises crescent or bay-shaped crater remains sometimes called the Stag’s Horn Mountains, whose highest points poke out above the Mare (flooding basalt sea). This tiny piece of lunar real-estate is feature rich. To the North (bottom) lies Promontorium Taenarium (meaning promontory) that extends westward into the Sea of Clouds. Thebit crater shows a wealth of detail on the crater floor.

What I am particularly chuffed with are the 3 tiny bumps attached to and near the end of the sword arrayed along the west (right hand side) as marked by the 3 light blue arrow heads. When I checked a LROC (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbital Camera) image of the end of Huygen’s blade, I can see (clearly) that these are 3 wedges of material that have slumped off the fault scarp.

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