Montes Apenninus Mountain Range & Copernicus Crater

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Montes Apenninus Mountain Range & Copernicus Crater

[Public Domain] 6 Oct 2014 Dylan O'Donnell
CATEGORY : Astrophotography
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Montes Apenninus is a 600km mountain range on the moon. In the top left of this photo, near the gap in the range, is where Apollo 15 landed. You know those shots of the astronauts doing donuts in the Lunar Rover? Yeh, this is where that happened.

The Copernicus Crater is one of the largest craters you can see with your own eyes. I’ve increased the colours here dramatically in Photoshop so you can see the colour variation between the “rays” coming out of the crater and the rest of the surface. There are different colours on the moon that show different minerals. Green areas have less lithium for example. Their exact geology will remain debatable until mankind gets back to the moon to confirm them. It is amazing that we can detect these subtle differences with the sensitivity of a modern DSLR cameras CMOS sensor though!

For the other photo / astro dorks, I took these two images and stitched them together using a Celestron 9.25″ SCT with a 2x barlow and a Canon 70D. The range side is a stack of about 15 full frame photos, but the Copernicus crater side is a stack from video using about 750 frames, which is why it appears smoother and less noisy than the rest.

Here are the separate images :

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