27 June 2008

I decided to take a look at where craters are located on the Moon and see if there is any kind or relationship between class and size. To do this I created a mash-up in Excel taking class information from C herrington (who gets it from Baldwin – The Measure of the Moon), the diameter information from the Field Map of the Moon (because it only lists one figure for each crater) and the location information from the Rukl Lunar Atlas. (The Field Map is also a Rulk map so I probably could have gotten the size and location information out of the atlas but I had started with the Field Map.)

The first thing I found was that Cherrington uses two systems to categorize craters. Some craters are listed with Baldwin’s class and others are listed with an age classifier. I am assuming that since Baldwin only classified 300-400 craters the ones that Cherrington lists by age are ones that Baldwin didn’t list. Cherrington doesn’t provide a crosswalk between the two systems of classification although his placement of the data in his gazetteer seems to imply that they are interchangeable. So I made a chart comparing the numbers of craters in each age and Class category.

The main product ended up being so cluttered with craters, like the surface of the Moon itself, that It is hard to interpret any trend.