[Over the past few weeks, I've collected a metric ton of cool pictures to post, but somehow have never gotten around to actually posting them. Sometimes I was too busy, sometimes too lazy, sometimes they just fell by the wayside... but I decided my computer's desktop was getting cluttered, and I'll never clean it up without some sort of incentive. I've therefore made a pact with myself to post one of the pictures with an abbreviated description every day until they're gone, thus cleaning up my desktop, showing you neat and/or beautiful pictures, and making me feel better about my work habits. Enjoy.]

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, one of my favorite space probes ever, takes amazing high-res pictures of the lunar surface. But more than that, it can map the elevations of lunar features using shadows as a guide. Knowing the angles of the Sun, the Moon, and its viewing position, it can accurately gauge the elevations of the Moon’s surface as it takes image after image, orbit after orbit.

The scientists on LRO used that information to put together a wild topographic map of the Moon’s far side:

In this map, red represents stuff higher up, blue lower down. The resolution is decent: 100 meters across the surface (NSEW) and 20 meters vertically. Not enough to keep you from stubbing your toe if you’re walking across Mare Orientale, but enough to get pretty good info on the geological history of our nearby cosmic neighbor.

Of course, the picture I’ve displayed here — and even the embiggened version if you click it — doesn’t really convey the scale of this map. For that, you really need to check out the pan-and-zoom version. That lets you drill down into the data and see just how detailed this map really is.

And stay tuned. In a few months the LRO team will release a new version of this map; the spacecraft is still plugging away over the Moon, and there’s more way cool stuff yet to come.

Image credit: NASA/GSFC/DLR/Arizona State University

- Video of the lunar far side from GRAIL/Ebb
- Tiny lunar volcanoes
- The extraordinary back of the Moon
- The extraordinary face of the Moon

[Over the past few weeks, I've collected a metric ton of cool pictures to post, but somehow have never gotten around to actually posting them. Sometimes I was too busy, sometimes too lazy, sometimes they just fell by the wayside... but I decided my computer's desktop was getting cluttered, and I'll never clean it up without some sort of incentive. I've therefore made a pact with myself to post one of the pictures with an abbreviated description every day until they're gone, thus cleaning up my desktop, showing you neat and/or beautiful pictures, and making me feel better about my work habits. Enjoy.]

First up in my Desktop Project is a weird crater on the Moon, seen by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter:

What a strange little thing! [Click to enlunenate.]

It’s about 140 meters across the rim, and it’s located in Plato, a big, relatively flat walled plain — basically, a crater that got mostly filled in with lava long ago — about 110 km (70 miles) across. You can see rubble and other debris scattered around it (in this image, sunlight is coming from below and to the left), and the interior is just odd.

This is called a bench crater, where you get roughly concentric features inside the crater itself. It’s probably from a high-velocity impact by a small (5-meter or so) asteroid, and the terrain where it hit probably has a thin layer of compacted regolith — the powdery surface material covering a lot of the Moon. This loose material blasted out more than the harder rock below, so you get this weird two-tiered structure.

Craters can be pretty complex; you might think you just get bowl, but in fact the impact speed, angle, the terrain, and the overall size of the impactor make a huge difference in crater structures.

Also? The first thing I thought of when I saw this picture was that it looked like the plaster cast they made of the giant ant footprint in one of my favorite movies of all time, "Them!" And that makes me a bigger dork than you can ever hope to be.

Image credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

Over the next couple of nights, especially Sunday and Monday (March 25 and 26), a very thin crescent Moon will move in between the incredibly bright beacons of Venus and Jupiter in the west right after sunset.

Here’s a map of what it’ll look like on March 25 around 9:00 p.m. local time:

The green line along the bottom is the horizon. Jupiter will be about 15° above the horizon at that time (though the exact orientation will depend on your latitude), and Venus about 10° above it — that’s about the apparent size of your fist held at arm’s length. The Moon’s position will change hour by hour, so where it is depends on when you look! So these three will make an amazing, shifting trio over the course of a couple of days. And all you have to do is face west after sunset and take a look! Here’s more information with details about the triple-conjunction.

This makes for a fantastic photo opportunity, of course. It also presents a great opportunity to see both Venus and Jupiter in broad daylight. Both can be hard to spot on their own, but the crescent Moon is far easier. Be mindful not to look at the Sun! But if you can spot the Moon in the daylit sky Sunday and Monday, you might be able to see the tiny specks of the two planets nearby. You can read about how to do this here.

I write a (very semi) monthly column for Blastr, the online portal for the SyFy Channel, and my latest article strikes close to my geeky heart.

When I was a kid I loved loved loved the TV show "Space: 1999". The premise of the show is that a nuclear waste accident blasts the Moon out of Earth orbit and into deep space, where weird unexplained hijinks ensue. Back then the scientific basis of the show didn’t bother me, but when I became a high-falutin’ science type, I wondered: how much energy would it take to hurl the Moon away from the solar system? And what would happen if it did?

The answer would not have made 13-year-old me happy. But as an adult I love playing with the physics and math, and you might as well admit you’re dying to know. So go read my article, and be glad our Moon has a nice, stable orbit right here around good ol’ planet Earth.

- Blastr: Invasion Earth!
- Blastr: So, you wanna blow up the Earth?
- Blastr: My Favorite TV Scientists
- Blastroid
- Blastr: Other than that, Spock, how was the movie?
- Blastr: I Was A Zombie For Science
- Big budget movies that got their science right
- Master of Blastr

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is a NASA space probe that’s been orbiting the Moon since June 23, 2009. On March 19 it will mark its 1000th day in orbit! To celebrate, NASA released this cool animation showing the history of the Moon:

According to current thinking, the Moon itself formed after a planet roughly the size of Mars slammed into the Earth at a glancing blow. This colossal impact threw billions of gigatons of debris into space. Some of that fell back onto Earth, and some formed a huge disk around the (now once again liquefied) planet. This material eventually coalesced to form the Moon.

But the story wasn’t done: with impact after impact, wave after wave of bombarding material shaped and reshaped the Moon’s surface. The animation above is a bit fanciful – it has sound, of course, and it shows time as a variable that flows at different rates – but gives a lovely overview of the violent past of our satellite. I like how I could see various features forming, knowing eventually they would be the familiar sites (and sights) I see through my telescope eyepiece. It’s a good reminder that the way we see things now is not the way they’ve always been, and that sometimes the forces that shape our current circumstances are not necessarily gentle or subtle.

[My congrats to everyone on the LRO team for 1000 days of amazing science! If you want to see more about LRO, I've written about it dozens of times, and you can also check the Related Posts below.]

Dave Brosha is a photographer who loves to capture spectacular and unusual night sky scenes — his picture of another photographer silhouetted against an aurora graced this blog in November 2011.

He just sent me two more he took last night. He went to Yellowknife, in the Northwest Territories of Canada. The aurorae were active last night as the Sun’s recent hissy fit sparked a geomagnetic storm, but by the time Dave go his equipment set up, the Moon was up and the aurorae fading. But never one to waste an opportunity, he took this incredibly dramatic and moving picture:

Stunning. [Click to enannulenate.] Ice crystals suspended in the air refract (bend) light from the Moon, and due to their geometry they create a ring around it. This is common in winter, but it’s rare — at least in the lower 48 — to get one this bright. The bright "star" on the edge of the ring at the top is actually Mars, which is terribly bright and ruddy in the night skies right now. The fainter star inside the halo is Denebola, the tail of Leo.

He also took this more upbeat picture (click to embiggen) which is another fantastic shot of the halo. You can still see Mars, with the bright Regulus (the heart of Leo) to the right, and just to the left of his hand is either Saturn or the bright blue star Spica in Virgo; I’m not sure which since they’re close to each other in the sky right now. Given how far it’s outside the halo, I’m leaning toward it being Saturn with his hand blocking the view of Spica. As an added bonus, you can see a faint arc of light at the top of the halo, called an upper tangent arc; these are more rare. I’ve only seen them a handful of times near the Sun, and never from a Moon halo!

Having spent a lot of time — a lot — out in the cold waiting for that one great shot, that one great view through the telescope, I can sympathize with what Dave went through to get these… and know he agrees that it was absolutely worth it.

Image credits: Dave Brosha, used with permission.

It’s funny what a difference a little resolution makes. For example, if you look at this photo of the Moon, you’d probably agree it’s very well done and very pretty:

Nice, right? But I post lots of really great pictures here, and this one at first glance doesn’t seem to distinguish itself.

Ah, but appearances can be deceiving: I had to lower the resolution way down to fit my blog. Way down. If you click to enlunenate it, you get a very, very different impression of it, since it’s actually a ginormous 3890 x 4650 pixel monster mosaic! That’s 18 megapixels of lunar goodness!

And it’s gorgeous.

Its not a single shot, but a very nicely done and seamless mosaic of images taken by André vd Hoeven using a Celestron 28 cm (11") telescope. It was actually created using video: he pointed at one part of the Moon, took a 30 second movie at 60 frames per second, and then used software which picked the best of those frames and added them together to produce a single image. He then moved the telescope to a different part of the Moon and repeated the procedure over and over again, until he had 107 images in total! These were then processed to sharpen them up, and finally put together to create the mosaic. The detail is crisp and stunning; you really need to just load up the big image and scroll around it.

I’m amazed at the detail and richness of it. Craters, cliff walls, mountains, and rays pop right out, as well as subtle features difficult to see just looking through a telescope. All in all, as I’m sure you’ll agree, it’s truly an incredible shot. So I’m glad we got that resolved.

Image credit: André vd Hoeven, used by permission. Tip o’ the dew shield to theritz.