Another processing from last February captures, this time of the beautiful Kepler area. I did not want to focus only on the relatively small crater but on the general area, overall on the changes in the textures and colours of the surrounding material. IN addition, I wanted to be able to capture with some resolution some of the many features this area presents.  Besides this approach suits my usual 5 parts mosaics I am taking to put up an image.  (technical details of the image after the "tedious" text :-) )  

Although problably known by you, fellow Astrobinners, let me rejoice in some of these features and highlights in the following lines. 

Geometries!
The wall  of Kepler appears to be  slightly hexagonal. Not as much as Encke, which lying southeast of Kepler, is distinctly six-sided. It is broken  on the western side by the small crater Encke N (3.5 km, very happy to have captured it!) 



Rays!
Despite the the relatively small crater, 31  km in diameter, Kepler stands out as it is  the centre of a remarkable  ray system (an indication of its "young" age). The ejecta rays are more than 300 km long. The ejecta blanket appears with an intense light colour that contrasts with the dark basaltic materials of Oceanus Procellarum. The ejecta rays show a great uniformity because all the ejected material is basaltic debris.  According to impact geometry and kinetics it is considered that  the transient Kepler crater reached a depth of  about 6 km. The basaltic unifomity indicates that the transient crater  did not went through the entire basaltic material of Procellarum, so at that point, the basaltic deposits are at least 6 km thick. Pretty amazing!. 


Volcanic domes!
In this region of the Moon, individual domes and groups of domes may  be readily observed. The are the largest lunar domes on the nearside of  the Moon. In their form, gradient of their slopes and formation they  may most readily be likened to terrestrial shield volcanoes.

Directly west  of Milichius is the dome Milichius Pi. North of Hortensium lies a group  of six such domes. The diameters of indivicual structures lie between 5  and 10 km, but their heights, on the other hand, only amount to a few  hundred metres. The gradients of the slopes are extremely low. The summits of many of the domes have caldera-like depressions (with summit  craters about 0.9 to 1.5 km in diameter), and a very few even have two.  Additional domes also lie in the area between Milichius and the crater  Tobias Mayer (33 km, 15.6°N, 29.1°W), as groups and individual, isolated  domes. A large megadome plateau lies south of T. Mayer.  The other significant area of vulcanic domes is South of Marius Crater, in the image some can be seen although not in very good conditions (light and capture wise!).



Lavas!
The most highly granular materials to the SE and NE of Kepler belong to the Fra Mauro Formation which is the impact ejecta of the Imbrium basin.
Of these lava flow formations, the most recent is the one  that appears bluish in colour due to the high titanium concentration. This high concentration indicates that the origin of these lavas is in the upper layers of the mantle. The formation in ochre and brownish tones lies stratigraphically below the bluer one and is therefore older (about 3.3 eons).

In some places, the basalts are even older as in more redish area the left of Besarion crater which corresponds to an around 3.6 eons old formation. 



Rima and crater ghosts!
Maestlin R is the remnant of a crater, almost  completely submerged by lava, and 61 km in  diameter. To the southwest it is open to the  lava of Oceanus Procellarum. A chain of at  least 13 craterlets, broken by one larger crater, begins at the eastern wall. The southeastern wall is crossed by a system of linear rilles,  Rimae Maestlin, which has an overall length  of about 80 km and a maximum width of 1.5  km.  Note that there is also Rima Milichius on the image, but unfortunately it is not well defined. 


As of the image itself, it is a mosaic of 5 parts, one center at the center (the crater) and the other 4 parts centred at the corners of the first. I do this to maximize the best part of the optics (the centered part), this is a belief i have, but not sure to be right, though. In any case, the 5 images (around from 30000 to 40000 frames each) allow for variations in seeing and sometimes some variations in quality consistency across the image....

Of those frames, I kept the 10 % of them (autostakkert) and then process with registax. Further details of the process can be found in the Version C, containing a detailed description of the workflow. 

The description information has been extracted from these wonderful sources:

Wikipedia

Virtual Moon Atlas

http://www.astrosurf.com/patricio/luna/kepler.htm.

The Cambridge Photographic Moon Atlas. Cambridge University Press.Chu, Alan; Paech, Wolfgang; Weigand, Mario.


Very glad to share this image (and long text) with you all!

Take care, Guillermo.