image by Frank Ryan, Shannon, Ireland
LPOD regularly publishes the best images of the Moon ever acquired from Earth. And each is accompanied by a 200-250 word description that hopefully brings geologic understanding. Despite having two separate search functions and Kurt Fisher’s comprehensive index, I often still have trouble finding a particular LPOD among the nearly 700 published since January 2004. Part of the problem with the search function of the older format LPODs is that many of the links no longer work. And sometimes I am looking for a feature that shows beautifully in the image but may not have been mentioned in the text and so can not be found with the searches or the index. In order to improve this sometimes frustrating situtation I have started to look through every LPOD, creating two indices. First is a features index of the names of craters, mountains, domes, rilles and ridges that are shown well. The second is a concordance of LPODs that show and describe the Lunar 100 objects. Although I am writing a Lunar 100 book (based on my monthly Exploring the Moon columns in Sky & Telescope), a shorter work describing each L100 object has been growing through the LPODs; the LPOD Lunar 100 list now makes it easy to find them all. Both of these new indices have links on the menu bar under the pages heading. Although my inspection of each LPOD has only covered August and September of 2006 so far, an amazingly large amount of the Moon has been covered: 92 separate features in 34 of Rükl’s 76 map sheets. There is much other information in the LPOD pages including nearly 900 images in the LPOD Photo Gallery, the 100 plus professional references in the Lunar Surface Bibliography and many hundreds of items in my older Chuck Wood’s Moon pages. As the collection gets larger it becomes more useful, but also more difficult to use because it is scattered in so many different files. I need to convert all of this to a database so everything is interlinked. Kurt’s indexing is start in this direction but there is much more to do. Any good suggestions on how to put all the pieces of LPOD into a database - one that works on a Macintosh, transfers to the web and is easy for me to manage?
Technical Details:
September 7th 2006. ETX-125PE + Canon 350D in prime focus orientation. Frank writes: This is actually two shots, (top and bottom half) merged in Photoshop. The original images are greatly underexposed as the correct exposure would have washed out any detail. The merged image was then level adjusted in Photoshop to enhance the detail.
Yesterday's LPOD: Smart-1 Crater not Observed
Tomorrow's LPOD: The Moon as an Orange
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