MOON TOUR
LANGRENUS CRATER
This month, we help you find one of the Moon’s best hidden gems
© NASA
The Moon has many ‘celebrity’ craters, like Copernicus, Tycho and Eratosthenes, which are big and bright enough to be obvious to the naked eye. However, these celebrities owe their fame to a stroke of good fortune: the bodies that blasted them out of the lunar surface millennia ago struck the face of the Moon pointing right at Earth. There are other craters that are just as big and interesting as Copernicus, but they are reduced to B- or C-list status because they were blasted out of areas not so well-placed for observation. Instead, we see them at an angle, foreshortened by the curve of the Moon’s limb. Langrenus is one such crater.