Arago Domes

[Dave Smith]

By chance I discovered that this part of the Moon was near the terminator on Monday (2 March 2009). This is a special area for me as about 10 years ago before I had an astronomy telescope I found these bumps through my birdwatching scope (80mm Swarovski) and wondered if they were domes which at the time had only heard about but never seen. On looking them up discovered that they were. I have included the appropriate part of the Rukl Moon atlas to show the crater names.

The two lumps alpha and beta are the volcanic domes.

Dave

[jonbarr87]

Certainly a gratifying find then.

[michaelmorris]

That's a nice capture of a difficult to image feature. Well done.

[Paxo]

Nice capture Dave, the light in just the right position shows these features of brilliantly. Well done..

Steve..

[Talitha]

:hello2:Congrats on capturing them after all these years, Dave.. good timing, the light angle is perfect! If you like domes, the area south and west of Copernicus is known as 'domeland'.. the Hortensius and Milichius environs are the most well known. And west of Kepler, crater Marius' area is so riddled with domes it looks like it has goose-bumps, lol. Congrats again.

[Dangerous-Dave]

Great shot, that can't have been easy. Like the side by side comparison with Rukl too!

[jgs001]

Well caught Dave, superb image

[Dave Smith]

Thanks everyone for your comments. Yes Talitha, I do like domes and have seen those that you mentioned. I think it is like one's first view of Saturn which blows your socks off, I'm not as excited by Saturn now even though the views I have are far superior. Don't get me wrong I do still love looking at Saturn. The Arago domes are always for me rather special, other domes I do like looking at and they will now be imaging targets.

I also rather liked having the Rukl Atlas image side by side but was a little concerned about infringing copyright. Maybe it would actually encourage folk to buy the atlas.

Dave

[Sam]

Brilliant work Dave, that's quite an achievement!

Sam

[beamish]

That's a great find !

Karlo

[qcdougn]

Dave,

Nice image and capture of the domes. I like the Rukl comparison too. I went to my copy for a closer look and noticed you could have included the Apollo 11 site just slightly to the right of your image.

Thanks for sharing and congrats on this very nice pic.

Doug