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April 29, 2016

IMAGE submitted by Mike Garuto

Lunascan colleague Mike Garuto found some suspicious items in an Apollo image (above). He had found the image on the internet and noted that it was apparently a Apollo 17 photo. He mentioned that he had found a "star-like object" on the lower left and had created a box showing it's location. "I found other perfectly formed stars very much like this one on different Apollo missions, all on the far side. I assure you I did not PS this. I found and boxed this particular one in after researching hundreds of Apollo missions photos."

I looked through all the Apollo 17 images to try to identify the copernican-type crater at the top. There were 23, 70 mm Hasselblad, film magazines with 3581 images but we were only interested in orbital shots, not surface feature images, so that narrowed it down somewhat. That image wasn't in there. I went back to Google and searched and found one image of the crater that mentioned Apollo 11, and I immediately went to the Lunar and Planetary Institute site to check out the 9 magazines of only 1408 shots. I could tell when I was getting close and finally, bingo! Not only did I find the image, which turned out to be familiar for several reasons, I found TWO slightly different versions of it. And very soon after that I discovered that we had investigated an anomaly in that area before. Both anomalies were in Ridge Section 120. The crater was Daedalis, and there had been a lot of controversey about it because of its location in the dead center of the Moon's Far Side!

AS11-44-6609 (NASA)
And the other image was
AS11-44-6611 (NASA)
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.

Fran Ridge,
Coordinator,
The Lunascan Project
skyking42@gmx.com