Contains:  Solar system body or event
Gassendi Crater, Bruce Rohrlach

Gassendi Crater

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging
Gassendi Crater, Bruce Rohrlach

Gassendi Crater

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

Equipment

Loading...

Acquisition details

Loading...

Description

At 110 km wide and 1.9 km deep, Gassendi crater on the northern edge of Mare Humorum is always a stunning lunar target to image, with its central peaks and numerous crater floor fractures and rilles. After the impact that formed the Gassendi crater, the floor of the newly formed crater was a molten 'sea' of magma, instantaneously created by the transfer of kinetic energy to the lunar crust. The impact-induced melt that filled the 110-km-wide Gassendi crater was deep enough to cover the base of the central impact-rebound mountain range, leaving only the uppermost mountain peaks protruding through the solidified lava sea.

Gassendi was originally planned as a potential landing site for the 1972 Apollo 17 landing (the final landing of the Apollo series lunar landings), but due to a paucity of detailed high-resolution imagery that may have compromised the mission, the site was dropped in favour of the Taurus-Littrow valley for the landing of Apollo 17.

West of Gassendi is the 230-km-long linear Rimae Mersenius.

Skywatcher 8 inch/f5, NEQPro6, Televue 5x, ASI224mc.

Autostakkert 3.0.14, Registrax 6, Lightroom, Topaz AI Denoise.

Comments

Histogram

Gassendi Crater, Bruce Rohrlach