hiya folks this here is cynthia and
brian from observational astro class 113 with cindy.
it's great fun, and here is our brilliant picture of the
moon...well, actually it's three pictures (one red, one blue and one
green) on top of each other thanks to Adobe Photoshop.
THIS IS
THE MOON (and don't tell us you
wouldn't have guessed that):
Don cha like it, eh? It took us a long time, but that was
due to a few focusing difficulties.
The large dark area on the right is the Mare Imbrium, and
the smaller dark area on the left is the Mare Serenitatis.
The dark crater just below Mare Imbrium is called Plato,
and the bright lines which snake into Mare Imbrium from the top of
the photo are ejecta rays from the large crater called Copernicus.
The light colored areas of the Moon are the lunar
highlands. They are mostly composed of a light-colored rock called
anorthosite. (Anorthosite is a rock made up almost entirely of
calcium-plagioclase feldspar.) The dark areas on the moon are the
lowland plains. They are made up of dark-colored flood basalts
(composed mostly of pyroxenes, plagioclase feldspars, and some
olivine, amphiboles, and mica).
That's Brian the geo major speaking. Another thing that's
still geo but not so geo-y is that the lighter areas in the moon are
older than the darker areas. When the moon was first created out of
HOT HOT HOT rock, the calcium-plagioclase (a type of rock that is
lighter--I always remember that because milk is white and has calcium
in it) "floated" to the top because it was less dense. This crust
cooled and melted. Then meteors crashed into the moon and allowed
the rock beneath it, which was more dense and also darker (2 facts
not related), to "show," thus we see this darker color. So
LIGHT=OLD
DARK=NEW(er...we're talkin the moon now)
Here's the star that we used to try and focus the durn
thing:
ain't it purdy?? "x-site-ting" is what brian says. It
doesn't look perfectly circular because it's not quite focused. Can
you tell which star it is, oh you astronomy buffs? It's in the
constellation Corvus.
