Daily Telescope: Imaging a nearly 4-billion-year-old region on the Moon

Enlarge / Mare Imbrium and its vicinity. (credit: Katie’s Observing Log)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It’s November 16, and today we’re looking very close to home, at our nearest celestial neighbor.

This strip of the Moon showcases the vast Mare Imbrium lava plain—it’s the large semi-circle that dominates much of the photo. Astronomers and planetary scientists believe this feature formed when a proto-planet struck the Moon about 3.9 billion years ago.