Lunar Treasure! There be gold in them there craters…..
Time for a bit of light relief. 🙂
While looking for sinuous rilles, lava tube skylights, grabens and bits of discarded spacecraft, and in between counting boulders and measuring craters, forum members have also found several possible treasure hoards obviously left by previous visitors to the Moon……
You might be fooled into thinking that these crosses are not the mark of Lunar Pirates at all but that they have been caused by the forces of Lunar geological processes. Maybe the stresses involved in crater formation on boulders landing heavily after being flung out over hundreds of metres just happened to cause them to crack by chance to form an “X.” Or you might suggest that the LRO camera took the image when the angle of the Sun was just right to catch a rocky rim and cast an “X” shaped shadow across the crater floor. You might even surmise that the albedo of the Lunar regolith just happens to resemble an “X” when viewed in a certain light.
But you would be wrong! We know different!
There’s treasure to be had, they obviously didn’t cover their tracks very well and we are on to them!
We are keeping the coordinates to ourselves but can you see where “X” marks the spot in these images?
Lunar Gold!
Pieces of Eight!
Treasure!
Silver!
So me hearties, come help us hunt for Lunar gold (and measure craters and count boulders too)! Sign up here. Bottle of best Lunar rum for the first to bring the treasure back!
Jules is a volunteer moderator for the Moon Zoo Forum.
Moon Zoo 
A while back… 5 or 6 weeks ago, I came across a VERY interesting image. I marked it as a “favorite”, then sent (I thought – no reply?) a message to your website. NOW, when I look at my ‘favorites’, due in part to the small size of the ‘favorites’ images I have not been able to find that interesting image again.
A brief description of what I found: A rather ‘normal’ lunar landscape with regular craters and nothing out of the usual EXCEPT that traversing the image was what at first looked like a boulder trail, BUT on closer inspection revealed a pattern of very regularly spaced and sized crater-like holes along an entire course or path. At first I thought it might be the trail left by one of the Russian rovers? But the ‘holes’ were apparently too deep(?) and terrain too rough for a surface roving vehicle to follow and had only one track, not two as the rovers had. The image did not seem to be an interference pattern or other transmission error. The regular spacing and size of the ‘holes’ indicated this was not a boulder trail… I would like VERY much to see this image again and have someone else look more closely at it. Any suggestions or help on this?
Sounds like it could be a crater chain to me, Dale. This is one thing we are interested in at Moon Zoo. One of our members, Caro found a SPECTACULAR, tadpole-shaped crater chain. It has been officially dubbed, “Caro’s Tadpole” Just this morning I found and posted a very nice crater chain myself. Keep up the good work and hope you can find and post your picture. We’d LOVE to see it.
Hi Dale, Sounds like you found some treasure of a different kind! I think Thornius is right, it does sound like it could be a crater chain. I suggest going through your favourites one by one clicking on the “View more Information” link to see a bigger image. it’s a fairly quick process – I’ve had to do it myself on several occasions when I’ve mislaid a favourite. And when you find it you could post it in the appropriate thread on the forum for comment. If it’s a really unusual image we can alert a Moon Zoo team member to take a look.
Forum is here: http://forum.moonzoo.org
Crater chain thread is here: http://forum.moonzoo.org/index.php?topic=107.0
Lunar pirates, thanks for this blog, Jules. These are fun to find.
Hi Dale, that does sound like a crater chain as Thornius says.
I recommend you come and take a look through some of our forum posts, you may find it there, or something similar.
Thanks for your comments.. I will try once again to find that image. I have in the past found several crater chains in my explorations of this page. But, what I referred to above was definitely not a typical crater chain. What leads me to say this is that all of the ‘craters’ were exactly the same size and were exactly the same distance apart. There was a connective ‘track’ of some sort connecting all the ‘craters’ and looked as though the ‘track’ was a surface feature and not a collapse feature. It was a single track and not, say, two parallel rows, such as though which might have been made by one of the Russian rovers. The ‘crater chain’ ran from the top to bottom of the image and looked VERY regular, as though something ‘sampled’ along a fairly straight course. All that I could imagine was that it somehow resembled the multiple regular pits found in the Nazca plains except it was one row instead of multiple rows….. I will look through all of the saved images in ‘my favorites’ once again.
I went thru all my ‘recent’ images, of which there are approx. 50. It was not there. The observation I’m referring to was made 5-6 weeks ago. I know that since then I have looked at many more than 50 or 60 imagese. I THOUGHT I sent a message to ‘Jules’ about this image at the time? Apparently I did not do that correctly? I know I saved it as a favorite as I hit the ‘save as favorites’. Does one have to ‘subscribe’ in order for a favorite to be saved? If so, then it was not saved… Is there any way to go further back in the ‘recent’ images?
Hi Dale – I’ll send you a PM on the forum. Probably easier than having a conversation here! 🙂
Problem – I can’t find you in the memberlist Dale and definitely haven’t received a PM from you. If you have a forum account please PM me again or leave a message in the Introduction thread here:
http://forum.moonzoo.org/index.php?topic=98.msg1745#msg1745
so I know your forum name and I’ll reply. As for the favourites – I understand that none are missing and that eventually we will be able to access them all and not just the last 50.