ARISTARCHUS

The Living Crater

Here are various photos and videos of one of the most controversial craters on the Moon.

This crater is on the list of "Transient Lunar Phenomenon" (TLP).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transient_lunar_phenomenon

This effect occurs on the Moon at numerous locations depending on

where and what angle the Sun shines and what minerals are at these locations.

Cropped from large Clementine image below.

3x enlargement

Notice anything

unusual yet?

Same as previous after

running through High Pass Photo filter.

After HP filter, applied mid level emboss. Changed lighting to come from the north.

Then reversed emboss

90 degrees.

Description of processing used:

After 3x enlargement, I ran it through a High Pass Photo filter which has numerous

adjusting controls for lighting and color frequencies and midtone edge rendering. This doesn't add artifacts to the original

image, in fact it clears up and sharpens the image. And I reduced the blue frequency to tone-down the luminunance. The emboss filter gives the image a 3D effect by using light and shadow to render height and width.

At a lighting direction I chose at 90 degrees from the north, I adjusted the height and width to the scale of the image.

The reversed emboss is rendering as if the light was coming from the opposite direction.

Results:

I reduced the light frequencies more than I normally would in this area as if it were over exposed.

The high pass filter removed the reflective light almost immediately

with no adjustments to frequency. After lowering the frequencies almost 75%,

bright light is still prevalent and in different color ranges.

The image clearly shows individual, different color luminance from several locations.

You can see in the image below the rest of the huge area around Aristarchus is dark (Oceanus Procellarum).

No reflectivity at all, suggesting no deposits.

The full image below shows the crater in the upper right corner.

Aristarchus is deep, almost 4 kilometers.

And 40km wide on a 4 km high plateau. The angle from the Sun should be

showing a shadow on the southwestern inside wall. It doesn't.

The slightly smaller crater Herodotus, this side of Aristarchus and not nearly as deep, shows a shadow.

There's also a volcanic rille running between the two craters completely obscured in shadow.

And it's 1-1.5 miles deep, approximately the same depth as the deepest area of the Grand Canyon.

In the Clementine image the sunlight is in the equivalent of being at high noon,

directly behind Clementine so very little shadow is in any of the central craters.

But way up where Aristarchus is, a shadow should be seen.

Cropped from this image of the Far Side but shows the western limb and Aristarchus on the Near Side.

Clementine Color

The center feature is Orientale Basin.

770Kb JPG

These four large southern craters look highly interesting too.

Especially the left and middle ones.

They're at the very bottom of the full image.

I'm going to look into these next.

88Kb JPG

This is a very large .tif image of Aristarchus. (18.7Mb)

It looks like a typical deep crater with nothing unusual inside.

It's from a new site of the Lunar Orbiter photos:

http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/Projects/LunarOrbiterDigitization/

This LO digital project is just getting started and the site

only has some photos posted from LO III and V so far.

Right click on image and "save target as".

VHR-5200-Med-Raw.tif

5200-med.jpg (5.95Mbs)

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/lunarorbiter/frame/?5200

5198-med.jpg (2.6Mbs)

5198-H3

(3.95Mbs)

5198-H2

(5.38Mbs)

5198-H1

(3.28Mbs)

This huge 20Mb released bmp version is "cleaned up" and

looks like a normal, bright crater. The overlapping edges have

been feathered-in quite well. And the reason it turned out to be

20Mb's is the heavy masking. This should have been only 1.5-2Mb's, max.

When you zoom in on this 2.2Mb tif image,

you can clearly see the overlapping sections

that were used to mask the area.

It's the same dimensions as the bmp version.

The tiff's use more data, yet it's only 2.2Mb's.

The overlapping mask isn't to "hide" anything, it's the necessary

process in rendering for 3D. The mask was created from the

mass-spectrometer data and other instruments associated with this image.

718Kb JPG

784Kb JPG

These color composites (above) focuses on the ultraviolet to visible color ratio information to accentuate differences
that are potentially diagnostic of ilmenite...an oxygen and titanium oxide source,

(iron titanium oxide is in red) as well as pyroclastic glasses.
The colors within the Aristarchus crater shows a diversity of materials...

anorthosite....alumina and other compounds...

basalt....containing alumina compounds...

and olivine....magnesium iron silicate....

Ideal mining ore, especially titanium and oxygen.

Wide Screen

I removed the Wide Screen version because of a conflict with IE and Windows Media Player.

Half a soccer field?....that's 65yards for the 130 yard International fields.

Aristarchus is 40km wide, rim to rim.

Just where are these 65 yard width images? They must be able to see exactly

what's inside the crater. Why aren't the images available to us if it's only a rich mineral area?

Well...we know the answer.