"Photographer’s Once-in-a-Lifetime Shots of the Lunar Eclipse and Aurora" by @PetaPixel - A photographer from Nevada took a chance on the possibility to capture the total #LunarEclipse with #AuroraBorealis. Eclipses always happen on schedule. But #weather may not cooperate. Especially unlikely for #spaceweather. But it worked. https://petapixel.com/2025/03/17/photographers-once-in-a-lifetime-shots-of-the-lunar-eclipse-and-aurora/ #Moon #aurora #astronomy #photography #space

My location for Luna 17 was too far west but was not ruled out by the laser data. Here is my LPSC abstract on it from 2005:

https://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2005/pdf/1194.pdf

I was contacted by the team trying to get new detections from Lunokhod 1:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1009.5720

With a small footprint and a very narrow range gate (see the second link) the uncertainty made the reflector very hard to detect, and my error wasted some of their time. Only when LRO found the rover did they succeed. #moon #luna17 #lunokhod1

To know where Lunokhod 1 was before LRO revealed it, the attempt at matching a map to images is one approach. But there was another - laser reflections. Lunokhod 1 carried a reflector supplied by France. The Vinogradov reference (Vol. 2) summarizes contemporary results, shown here. The ellipse is the spread-out footprint of a laser shot from Earth (footprints are much smaller now). laser shots centred at 1 and 2 gave reflections, but weakly at 3, not at 4. #maps #moon #luna17 #lunokhod1

The significant thing to take from this is that I was about 6 km too far west. I chose that spot because it was the only place where there seemed to be a pair of craters matching the largest two in my relief map. As we have seen, the largest one doesn't really exist so I was never going to get it right. In fact, even the biggest crater (Borya) in the traverse area is almost invisible in the old image. This became a problem beyond just me being wrong... #moon #luna17 #lunokhod1

There is one other thing I want to say about Lunokhod 1. I will start by combining two posts from earlier in this sequence. This image shows 3 panels at left illustrating my old guess about where Luna 17 landed (best image at the time, from Apollo 15; a map of the traverse area showing craters on the old Soviet map, and between them, where I thought that map fitted on the image. At right is a context map for my later maps, with the old outline added.
#maps #moon #luna17 #lunokhod1

The Moon has been keeping me busy lately, but I'm back on the job. That view of the northern horizon showing distant hills can be replicated using synthetic panoramas made in Quickmap:
(https://quickmap.lroc.asu.edu).

Here is a panorama made at the Luna 17 location but at an elevation of several hundred meters, so it looks a bit further over the horizon. There are hills in other directions not seen by Lunokhod 1. #moon #luna17 #lunokhod1