Contains:  Solar system body or event
Oceanus Procellarum, Steve Lantz

Oceanus Procellarum

Oceanus Procellarum, Steve Lantz

Oceanus Procellarum

Equipment

Loading...

Acquisition details

Loading...

Description

I decided to give lucky capture imaging of the moon a try and pulled out my AstroPhysics refractor last night (12/9/2019). The moon was close to being full so I had to go for a sliver of interesting terrain near the lunar limb which happened to contain Oceanus Procellarum. In the image, we are looking across Oceanus Procellarum; the prominent rays are from the crater Kepler. The three large craters across from Kepler that lie at the terminator are, from bottom to top, Grimaldi, Hevelius and Cavalerius. Oceanus Procellarum, also known as the Ocean of Storms, spans about 1800 miles and is the largest dark spot on the moon. Data from the Japanese lunar orbiter Kaguya/Selene show that Oceanus Procellarum is surrounded by concentrations of a low-calcium form of the mineral pyroxine, which can be formed by the excavation and melting that occur when the moon is struck by a large object. Accordingly, scientists have theorized that Oceanus Procellarum may very well be the scar from a large impactor that created a magma ocean that was about 3,000 km wide and several hundred kilometers deep. I took six thirty-second videos, each of which provided about 480 images. I registered and stacked the images in Registax; for the stacking I chose to select the best 4 % of the images. The image here was from one such set. All exposures were 4 ms at a gain of 200. I employed a H-alpha filter to attempt to reduce atmospheric disturbance.

Comments

Histogram

Oceanus Procellarum, Steve Lantz