MOON TOUR
MESSIER AND MESSIER A
These two small craters are an intriguing sight through a telescope this month
Look at the Moon through a powerful telescope, a simple binocular or even just your naked eye and you can tell it had a violent past. Countless craters spatter its surface, each one a wound blasted out of the crust by the impact of a piece of rock or metal that came barrelling in from deep space. Most are so old that they’re now just pits, empty eye sockets staring sightlessly from the Moon. But a few craters are young enough that they are still surrounded by systems of rays, bright lines of debris thrown out across the lunar surface when they were formed.