Saturday, April 24, 2004

Moon Craters Identified

I've been curious to identify the various craters on the moon pictures that I have taken, and I'm making some progress.

I was able to download a free photo atlas of the moon that is pretty nice. It is called the "Virtual Moon Atlas" and can be downloaded here. It was originally produced in French, but it is available in a number of languages.

The VMA lets me see what the moon looks like at a specific date and time. This makes it easy to figure out what any given picture is showing, as long as I can remember when I shot it.

Here are a couple of the pictures that I took back in March with the names and sizes of some craters. Picture 1 Picture 2

If you want to see the pictures at a larger scale, you can get them here by clicking on the thumbnails etc. You may have to download the actual full size image and view it offline to see it really big, because I notice that Internet Explorer scales them down quite a bit when it displays them.

This atlas could prove handy, even for someone who doesn't take pictures but merely looks at the moon with the naked eye or with binoculars, and wants to know what they are seeing up there.

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