Impacts, lava, rilles: Learning to read the Moon

The Moon is one of the most fascinating objects in the night sky for amateur observers, yet many regard it as a nuisance and often know little about it. In fact, the Moon is an amazing museum of early Solar System history with abundant geological features that reveal countless intertwined events. Observing the Moon becomes more enlightening and challenging once you start to decipher sequences of impacts, eruptions and crustal fracturing, learn to recognize the connection of concentric rilles to mare lavas, and appreciate how smooth crater floors are tied to giant impacts a thousand kilometers away. With its thousands of easily visible formations of various ages and ever-shifting illumination, the Moon has many secrets for observers to discover.

Back to conference programme

 

About Chuck Wood

Charles A. Wood is a veteran lunar observer and former member of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona where he worked on mapping the Moon and cataloguing its craters. Currently he chairs the IAU lunar nomenclature committee. He wrote The Modern Moon – A Personal View (Sky Publishing) and most recently has coauthored The Kaguya Lunar Atlas (Springer). Over the last decade Wood has written lunar columns for Sky & Telescope and for seven years has published the online Lunar Photo of the Day. He is not yet bored by the Moon.

Lunar Photo of the Day