Tag Archive | pareidolia
July 16, 2012  

A Hawk in the Landscape

Another picture from the ever popular Pareidolia thread on the forum: a Hawk-like feature in Joliot Crater, a 164 km-wide large, old, fairly eroded far side crater on the eastern limb. Part of the crater is just visible from Earth during a favourable libration. The hawk shape has been produced by brighter material overlying darker regolith – probably the result of several impacts excavating higher albedo material. A small fresh impact forms the beak.

Click for bigger image

posted by kodemunkey

Here’s the view of Joliot from ACT-REACT Quick Map. It’s flooded with lava and contains several ghost craters which are lava flooded craters only visible under the right lighting conditions as raised rings.


25.8°N 93.1°E

The crater is named in honour of Frédéric Joliot-Curie who married Marie Curie’s daughter and together they were awarded the Nobel prize for Chemistry in 1935 for their work on the structure of the atom.

Here’s the NAC image to explore further: M106260230RC.

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October 31, 2011  

Halloween Moon

Humans are good at recognising patterns and picking out shapes from background noise. Sometimes we see what isn’t really there. To celebrate Halloween here are a few ghoulish “items” from our forum Pareidolia thread. You can see more here.

Skull
 Head
Goblin
 Ghoulish face


Thanks to forum members placidstorm and ElisabethB.

Happy Halloween!

October 24, 2011  

Flaming Heart Moon fish

Forum regular Tom128 originally found this feature back in February and called it a Valentine flaming heart. It was recently rediscovered by kodemunkey, champion of the ACT-REACT Quick Map search tool and became the Moon fish. It is situated at the end of a long landslide on the walls of Chladni crater located at 4.01N, 1.04 E. Moon Zoo team member IreneAnt thought is was likely caused by a low velocity impact (either primary or secondary) which disturbed material on the crater wall enough to trigger a separate mini landslide.


NAC ref: M109229693RE

We are collecting landslides such as this on the forum. They can form quite intricate patterns and because they have not been eroded by further impacts they are thought to be relatively young features (which in lunar terms means less than 1 billion years old).

There are more unusual features to be found in the forum’s Pareidolia collection.