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20160426; updated 20181028

The alleged anomaly in a NASA Apollo image had 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.

   2018-10-23 19:32   61K

AS11-44-6609
[IMG]

AS11-44-6609 (high res)

ASA Photo ID: AS11-44-6609        File Name: 10075255.jpg
Film Type: 70mm                    Date Taken: 07/16/69
Title: Oblique view of lunar farside photographed from orbit looking southwest
Description:
An oblique view of the lunar farside photographed from the Apollo 11 
spacecraft in lunar orbit, looking southwest. The large crater in the
center  of the picture is International Astronomical Union crater (IAU) no.
308,  which is located at 179 degrees east longitude and 5.5 degrees south 
latitude. IAU crater no. 308 has a diameter of about 50 statute miles. The 
ruggted terrain seen here is typical of the farside of the Moon.

AS11-44-6611
[IMG]

AS11-44-6611 (high res)

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 was AS11-44-6609.

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 is Daedalus and is in Ridge Section 120 on the lunar Far Side which we completed on April 5th, 2013

http://www.lunascan.com/fsregions/0120dir.htm

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

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 in the third link below.

References:

 as11-44-6609.pdf        2018-10-26 09:31   69K  
 as11-44-6611.pdf        2018-10-26 09:28   67K  
 daedalus_haskin.pdf     2018-10-23 19:32   61K

What we need to do now is search for these items on the mucher resolution LRO images at around
5.5 S 179 E

Francis Ridge
The Lunascan Project