Spectacular view of the Moon's Aristarchus crater

Sorry if this has been posted before, but when I saw this image my jaw dropped:



This is the walls of the Aristarchus crater. Looks a lot like an open-pit mine, except it's approximately 3.5 km deep! This amazing image was acquired on 10 November 2011 as LRO passed north-to-south about 70 km east of the crater's center while it was slewed 70° to the west. The spacecraft was only 26 km (16.2 miles) above the surface.

Image source: www.planetary.org...
Official LRO article with more images and details
Browsable LRO image: wms.lroc.asu.edu...

Exploring the view:


I really wish we had colour images like this; the Moon isn't utterly black&white.

reply to post by wildespace





OMG!! look at all of those alien bases on the moon!


OT: This is pretty sweet! looks awesome.

reply to post by wildespace


Oh wow, so they're not craters after all - they're quarries.

reply to post by wildespace


nice to see a different landscape, but I think more than one day on there would be too long, looks quite a boring place really.. well the side we can see does, perhaps if the creatures on the other side were friendly and offered a bowl of soup it would help stay longer... thanks for sharing

I watched this twice, decided I could even see a profile 3/4 towards the end of a human face and, after much thought have decided that this is a 'quarry', 'mined by angelics for the stuff of making star childs', because somehow it doesn't look like a meteor crater in which the sides flow outwards due to the burst of energy. Unless of course energy bursts in stages on the moon. I wait to read other's views on this and agree its a shame its in black and white.

I find the moon fascinating having read the book Who Built the Moon. Whenever I hear there is 'life' on other planets my first reaction is are their moons like ours in a similar position to ours etc? Without our moon our oceans would be stagnant and putrid and just that simple tiny thing is what makes our planet pretty unique. I expect there are planets with moons like ours but my curiosity burns quietly on this one.

I can't wait to see if we go to the moon whether its again or not and what we will discover there. I think the publics won't be either religiously distraught or filled with horror at anything that we find out.