message

April 26, 2016

IMAGE submitted by Mike Garuto

The alleged anomaly in a NASA Apollo image has been noted by Mike Garuto, one of our Lunascan members. He remarked that it seemed to be interesting and on the surface, and he had hopes we could open the file and zoom in on the small boxed section in the lower left. Rob Duvall noticed that the "star" was circular, and within that area all of the features were gone. It looked like it had been photo-shopped.

The image looked familiar, but I was initially unable to place it, except that I was pretty sure it wasn't from the Near Side. Mike had thought that it was an Apollo 17 image, so I began looking at theApollo 17 film magazines, both the 70 mm Hasselblad and the (Mapping) Metric Camera. There were 23 film magazines of 3581 images! When nothing turned up I began some wild Google searches and looked at a lot of images from Apollo 17. Nothing. But once I tried other search clues the image finally showed, but it was listed as an Apollo 11 photograph. Once I had the correct mission I went into the Hasselblad and Metric Camera images and looked at 9 magazines of 1408 images. I was able to find the exact image. There were actually two, and the first one I put up on the Lunascan email list was the incorrect one. AS11-44-6611 had been close, but the bottom section did not contain the area of the anomaly reported. The correct image is AS11-44-6609. The other image is AS11-44-6611.

IMAGE: AS11-44-6611 (NASA)

We had visited this area before when Ananda Sirisina reported a suspected anomaly in 2013: (See farside/reports/daedalus.htm in link below)
It had been interesting that this site is also VERY close to the proposed location of a 2001 Space Odyssey-type lunar base where no radio signals from Earth can contaminate signals from outer space. The Lunascan Project database had shown that the huge Copernian-type crater to the north was Daedalus and is in Ridge Section 120 on the lunar Far Side which we completed on April 5th, 2013
http://www.astrosurf.com/lunascan/0120dir.htm

Our thanks to the team, especially Ananda Sirisina, Mike Garuto, Rob Duvall & Ned Haskin.

http://www.astrosurf.com/lunascan/farside/reports/daedalus.htm

Daedalus is a prominent crater, 93 km wide and 3 km deep, located near the center of the Far Side of the Moon. It is said to be the largest crater on the Moon. famous and important for other reasons as you will soon see. The inner wall is terraced, and there is a cluster of central peaks on the relatively flat floor. Because its location is shielded from radio emissions from the Earth it has been proposed as the site of a future giant radio telescope, which would be scooped out of the crater itself, much like the Arecibo radio telescope, but on a vastly larger scale.

It has also been postulated that "somebody else" could be using this central Far Side location as a base. In contemporary sources it was called "Crater 308" (this was a temporary IAU designation that preceded the establishment of far-side lunar nomenclature).

Blow-ups of the area of the anomaly in this discussion are pending.

Francis Ridge
The Lunascan Project