The Caves of Copernicus

Jackie discovered an excellent website by Robert Zimmerman while investigating the Chandrayaan-1 lunar lavatube cave discovery, and this a follow-up relating to the crater Copernicus... in a new thread since I intend to post a lot of images relating to it.

RZ posted an article on the Caves of Copernicus in Feb/11, with information from NASA engineer James Fincannon. He seems to be NASA’s cave-man (sorry couldn’t resist ), and is the discoverer of the 3 official moon caves and a natural bridge. Fincannon has now recently found a bunch of possible caves in Copernicus!

http://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/essays-and-commentaries/the-caves-of-copernicus-and-the-ocean-of-storms

You’ll note that there is absolutely no mention of which NAC’s the images are from and only a rough location of each cave.

Anyway, RZ did an updated article on this in Apr/11 with a bit more recent info from Fincannon. Some of RZ’s images have lats and longs, but again, there is no NAC info in the article. The exciting discovery is that Fincannon may have found an actual walk-in cave in Copernicus!!

http://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/essays-and-commentaries/exploring-the-floor-of-copernicus

Stay tuned for more detailed information on the NAC’s and images!

C

That is very interesting. The smoke and mirrors are showing...I am glad you you like that website!

There is so much information- Glad you are seeing it with a better tuned eye than me! I missed the part about the walk-in cave, too.

Thank you for leading the way through this, and for helping everyone see what this all means. Looking forward to your update, my friend.

Well, things are a bit quiet right now, so I guess it’s time to start off my series of posts on the Pits of Copernicus, all discovered by NASA engineer James Fincannon, as posted on the Behind the Black website. Fincannon has found a total of 10 features in Copernicus: 5 caves, designated with an H, and 5 sinks, designated with a C (stands for confusing!) Zimmerman, the website author, has found a few more features, as well.

So, I’ve looked at all of the sink features, and though they are special in that they are non-impact craters, and may indicate underground caverns nearby, they all look like craters… and nothing special to me, a non-geologist… and therefore I will omit these from this post.

I will use the designators that Fincannon has assigned for the caves, but will label them as pits. I was originally going to do these in numerical order, but H1, H4, and H5 are all in the same general area covered by quite a few NAC’s and I haven’t finished with them yet. H2 and H3 are in separate areas, and since I’ve finished these two, I’ll post them first.

Today, I’ll start with H3. I’ll try not to be too boring, but these posts are more for reference so that anyone can check these out for themselves without having to do research just to find out the exact locations of the pits, and which NAC’s they’re shown in.

A note on the images I post: they are all cropped from the original LROC IMG’s…they are not screencaps from Zoomify unless specifically stated as such. The images are all oriented correctly with North at the top, and West at the left. (Zoomify does not correct for this!) If they are not at full resolution, or if anything else has been altered (such as contrast), then I will mention this in the image label.

Also, I should mention that I would much prefer to post BMP files, but they are 10 times the file size of JPG’s!

First, here’s a general locator image from the LROC site for Copernicus:




Pit H3

Pit H3 is quite near Copernicus A, which you can see in the above image is the small crater east of Copernicus’ central peaks in the main crater’s terraced wall.

The following image is a composite that I’ve put together from the NAC’s, and is extremely reduced in size. You can see the exact site of the pit, and the location of it with reference to Copernicus A.



The next 2 images are of H3 at high-res…





These are the only 2 NAC’s of H3, and I have to admit that this is not a particularly great-looking pit! The next pit, H2, will be more interesting!

C

You have my full attention! Can I say thank you now, for taking the time to find this information and share it with all of us?! What a good teacher, C!

Perhaps this site http://forum.moonzoo.org/index.php?topic=576.0 will be helpful as well? The first post is also by James Fincannon, and he seems to go into a bit more detail regarding the composition of the cave and sinks and how he has been able to locate them. I am really enjoying the hunt for lunar caves - and am boggled by the implications. Looking forward to your next dispatch-

*bows* (to the Queen of Information Finding)

Thank you once again Jackie for the Moonzoo link! Great work!

The post at that link contains the kind of detailed information that should have been posted in the Behind the Black articles! I am hoping the Moonzoo people will be interested in some of the caves that I've discovered in the process of creating the posts for Signal! Two of them look really good to me!!

Anyway, there's lots of info to go through still, and I should have time to post H2 tomorrow night!

C

You crack me up -

I may find a site, but you are the one that unlocks the potential ~*~ I think this should be offered as a college course, as we are amassing about as much info as can be found on these structures.

Here's another, my friend - and I hope this one adds a new perspective!

http://lunarnetworks.blogspot.com/2010/09/closer-look-at-king-crater-natural.html

Oh - it goes without saying of course - but check out those links to the right hand side of this site!

Thank you Jackie for that link and info on the bridge of King Y... I have seen some of this before, but this is a pretty good article. It is on my 'to do' list

C

Ahh… Friday!!

And today I’ll post the pit H2 information. We’ll start with an image of the general location…



You can see from the above image that H2 is NW of Copernicus A, out on the floor of the main crater. The next image shows its specific location south of the “Cape”.



Here it is at full size. I keep forgetting that the board tends to cut off the width on these images, and you may need to open these images to actually see H2.



Though it’s only about 20 feet in diameter, you can see that H2 is a definite pit!

You’ll notice another feature to the west, and I’ve labeled it as “not a pit”. I could be wrong, but the dark shadow looks like it is actually a shadow of a promontory in the crater. You can see this a bit better in the next image, where there’s no contrast adjustment.



I always have problems relating to the image scale in these images… how big are the features that we’re looking at? It’s very hard to relate to… so… for fun, I’ve added a couple of things at the proper scale in the next image.



The 1960’s VW bug is 5 feet x 13 feet, and the Boeing 747-400 is 232 feet long, with a wingspan of 212 feet, and the fuselage is 20 feet wide. The dimensions are from wiki.

This should give an approximate idea of the scale of any of the images around 0.5m/pixel. It’s obvious that if there were any structures / buildings in these images they should be readily visible… unless they’re buried in dust!!

So, that’s it for today. Tomorrow I’ll post some images of possible caves that I’ve discovered near H2.

C

Copernicus - You amaze me...By your effort, you just put this all into perspective - For this old lady, at least. As soon as I saw the plane and the VW, I could of course imagine how large that cave was. Brilliant!

Is there a way to add color to the caves that you have located? I am that visually challenged, I hate to admit, and I want to understand this information. What you are doing is showing all of us the possible future 'home' of some of our population, and it is very exciting.

The feature you have labled as 'snake' - Is that for a marker for location, or is there something significant regarding that formation that I have missed? Thank you for the education!

Continuing on in the H2 area…

I have to admit that previously I’ve been strictly looking for anomalies in the LROC images, and I’ve not been paying much attention to anything else in the images, such as possible caves!

In the case of H2, I did not have any NAC numbers at the time, and only had a general area in which to search for it, and… well, I could not find it at first! But what I did find was the “not a cave” feature, plus 2 good cave candidates, which I will label A and B. In each case I thought I’d found the feature pit H2, but I was wrong!!

So, without further ado, I’ll present these 2 cave candidates.

First, a locater image based on the H2 site:



Next, an image with both Candidate A and B at half size:



Candidate A

Now here’s Candidate A…



And without contrast adjustment:



Now 2 images of Candidate A at 400%





Hmm… it’s certainly not a pit, and it’s hard to tell whether this is a real cave or not. I think Candidate A is a bit weak as a cave candidate.


Candidate B

Now here’s the second one…



And again, without contrast adjustment:



It doesn’t look all that interesting, does it? Well, here’s 2 images at 400%





How’s that, huh? It sure looks like a real cave entrance to me!!! There’s even a bit of a walk-way down to it!! I’d say that this is a very strong candidate for cave status!!

Now… Jackie was wondering about the “snake” feature label… it’s a locator for yet another possible cave I found, candidate C. Unfortunately there’s only the one NAC of it.


Candidate C

Here’s the locator image:



And now the feature at full size:



We’ll pull off the contrast to see inside a bit better:



And then bump it up to 400%



Again, it’s too bad there’s only the one NAC, since this looks like a bit of a weak cave candidate as well.

So, that’s it for now for the H2 area… As noted, I stumbled across these features by accident while looking for H2, and I’m pretty sure there’s more to be found if someone wanted to take the time to look!

Next up will be the H1, H4 and H5 pits… and more possible caves that I’ve found. At this point it looks like the post will be split into several sections, and probably won’t start until next weekend (I’m still working on it!!)

@Jackie

Glad you liked the image scale thing that I did. I’ll see what I can do about adding some color in the future.

C

THANKS FOR YOUR HARD WORK. LOOKING FORWARD TO THE NEXT INSTALLMENT!

Cheers, Rick

Hmm… it must be the summer doldrums…

Pit H1

Well, I’ve finally got the next 3 pits all sorted out, and here’s H1…

First, an image to locate it…



Following the discoverer’s lead, here’s H1 as seen by Lunar Orbiter 5’s high res camera:



This is from LO5-154-H2, and it just happens that I use LO5-155-med as my index image for mapping the LROC NAC’s onto. The following is the only LROC med res (which I call low res) image of H1.



Next a high res image…



And the final high res image…



This image is at a slightly different angle and it looks like a proper pit here… or half-pit, given the shape!

Tomorrow, I’ll continue on with pit H4, which is southeast of H1.

C

...and one more of H1, by request...



C

It’s Friday again, and time for another Pit Report

Today we’ll have a brief look at pit H4.

Pit H4

We’ll start off with a general locator image, which shows pits H1, H4 and H5. Since the pits are visible on the image, this can suffice as a way to locate them.



As you can see from the locator image there are an awful lot of possible pits in this area!! I tried not to get too sidetracked while doing this, but did look at about a half a dozen possibles, discarding all but two. Anyway, there are actually 7 NAC’s of H4, though 3 of them are med res (what I call low res).

So, rather than bore you completely with 7 images of H4, I’ll just post 1 low res, and 3 high res images. First the low res:



This is actually the highest res of the 3 low res NAC’s, and I chose this one because the light angle is such that it shows H4 to be an actual pit.

Here are the first 2 high res images…





You can see that there’s an interesting “peninsula”-type rock in the pit’s NE corner.

Now the final image:



In this one, the light angle is similar to the low res image, and H4’s pit aspect is visible again.

I should mention that the high res image that I chose not to post is actually the mate to M124708491LE (ie. M124708491RE), taken at the same time.

Well, that’s all for today. Tune in again tomorrow for the last pit, H5.

C

Today we’ll look at the last “official” pit in Copernicus, pit H5.

Pit H5

As with pit H4, there are a lot of NAC’s (eight) of H5: 4 low res and 4 high res. Once again, I won’t post all of them, in an attempt to keep the boredom factor down. Since we’ve already seen a locator image for H5, I’ll start with one low res image:



And now a high res image:



And finally one where you can see that it really is a pit:



Once again the angle of view has made a big difference in how the pit looks.

So, this concludes my post on the caves (only) in Copernicus that NASA engineer James Fincannon found and presented.

Next up, I’ll have a brief look at some of the cave candidates that Behind the Black's Robert Zimmerman found.

C

Robert Zimmerman posted some possible caves at

http://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/essays-and-commentaries/exploring-the-floor-of-copernicus

I have run into a lot of possibles while researching the posts in this thread, and have spent some time exploring them to see whether they really were caves or not. Looking back at Zimmerman’s post, I realize that I had independently looked at some of the possibles that he posted.

So, for completion sake, I’d like to review them at this point.

First, his image labeled “westofH4”…

Here is a low res image of the area:



I thought that these were interesting when I looked at them, but after reviewing all of the low and high res images of them, I concluded that none of these were actually pits or caves.

Next, his image labeled “farnorthofH4”…

A low res image of the area:



This is one area that I hadn’t looked at independently, but I spent some time on these possibles because of his post. Unfortunately there’s only a couple of low res NAC’s and a couple of high res NAC’s of this area, with the lighting being bad (for cave hunting) on one of each resolution NAC’s.

Based on what I could see though, the possibles that he pointed out in his image are unlikely to be caves (or pits). More NAC’s of the area would be helpful in resolving this.

And last, his image labeled “northofH4”…

A low res image of the area:



There are only 2 high res images of this area, but that was enough to confirm that all but one of the holes were just gullies. I had already considered posting the “possible pit” in the image as a cave candidate (before I’d examined his images), but had decided not to without additional images to support this conclusion.

So, out of all of Zimmerman’s possible caves, I think that there may be one candidate, but more NAC’s are needed to confirm it.

Next up, I’ll present a good cave candidate that I’ve discovered in the H5 area.

C

Today I’ll present my final cave candidate in Copernicus, Cave Candidate “D”. I had actually planned on presenting several other candidates but all of them turned out to be just gullies in the end.

It is always helpful to have as many NAC’s as possible to confirm any findings! Even low res NAC’s are worth examining, since they could be taken at the right light angle that confirms (or not) what you’ve found in other NAC’s! Low res NAC’s can also be a good starting point for any search.

Cave Candidate “D”

Initially I didn’t have an image of H5 (until Jackie posted the link to moonzoo), and I was looking to the east of H4 for a pit likely to be H5. When I discovered Candidate “D”, I thought it might be H5!

So, first a locator image:



As you can see, it’s a bit southeast down the same channel that H5 is in. If you look carefully (maybe add some contrast, too), you can see that there’s another channel coming in from the middle right that heads southwest (under the mound!) and crosses H5’s channel at the location of Candidate “D”.

There are 7 NAC’s (3 low res and 4 high res) of this feature, but I’ll show you just one of the low res NAC’s, plus the 4 high res ones.



And now a couple of high res images:





In the last 2 high res images you can see that the cave entrance is rather rectangular-looking:





Cave Candidate “D” looks like a walk-in cave to me, and I wonder which way the cave goes… Up the northwest channel toward H5? Or up the northeast channel under the mound? Or both ways?!!

This concludes my post (for now) on the Caves of Copernicus. We’ve visually examined caves H1 through H5, and looked at a number of other possible caves. Additionally, I’ve offered up 4 more possible cave candidates, Candidates “A” through “D”.

And… I’ll add one last post…

Next up, an anomaly I’ve discovered near H4!

C

Corpernicus - You have taken a fairly speculative subject and suddenly brought it into focus for all of us. While tending to our sick folks, I have been sneaking on here and looking for your updates. I don't think I will ever stop wondering differently about the moon, and it has helped feed a spark of curiousity in my grand daughter that may in turn cause her to educate herself in the direction of astronomy.

Thank you so very much for sharing your caves, and for helping us to see more clearly what is so close to home! One day, one of us may provide you with the same level of intrigue!

~Jackie

@Jackie

Thank you for your appreciation and kind words, Jackie

As always, I post in hopes that others will be encouraged to spend more than a couple of minutes looking into the many terabytes of images that have been made available to us, with the goal of enlightment, and hopefully discovery of something that says the 'we are not alone' in the solar system!

I also realize that: if a NASA engineer can write a FORTRAN programme to find caves in the images (he did a good job of it, too!), then others have written programmes to find other "things" in the images... "things" that are guaranteed to be removed by the time the images are made available to us.

Since it is unlikely in the extreme that an employee(s) is spending 8 hours a day going over these images looking for these "things", you can be sure that many, many "things" have been missed by the parameters of the computer programme used for "thing" removal. I also very much doubt that a scientist is going to report a "thing" if he/she finds one.

I will continue to look for caves... and "things" too!!

Copernicus

So, I think it’s time for a break from topic posting for a bit, but I’ll leave you with this one…

While checking out pit H4 on the NAC’s I noticed an object by itself that seemed to have an odd contrast to it. Closer examination showed that it had a bit of a strange shape. Now, up front here, I’ll say that this is probably just a boulder… but… it might not be.

The object is shown on 6 NAC’s: 3 low res and 3 high res. Here’s a locator image:



I’ll post one of the low res images so that you can see the object’s shadow:



Now a couple of high res images:





In the above 2 images the object appears to be wedge-shaped, like a piece of pie, with the narrow end pointing toward us.

Now, the third and final high res image:



You can see in this image that the coloration is very noticeably different than anything else in the area, and it almost looks like there are some protrusions at the bottom. So let’s zoom in…



Well, this is pretty interesting looking! I sure don’t know what this is!!! A boulder? A small vehicle of some kind?

C

I am James Fincannon, that guy who originally found these caves/pits in the crater Copernicus. I am pleased to see you have an interest in these caves/pits. Interest died out for a while, but I was waiting for more LRO images to be put in the LRO ASU web site. The last batch had some more in Copernicus crater but nothing at dramatically different enough Sun angle to make a difference.

Regarding the "unknown object", I had convinced myself that it is a small cave/pit at the junction of the other three cave/pits and let Zimmerman know about it in an email during that early phase. I admit it might be a dark rock but it looks like a skylight to me.

Regarding some of the other caves/pits that Zimmerman and Copernicus found, I came across most of them (I think I looked at every Copernicus floor image till my eyes blurred), but needed more images before I could say they were caves/pits.

The "H" was for holes, I didn't have enough nerve to call them caves not being a lunar scientist since a cave needs to have substantial stone/rock ceiling in my opinion while a hole doesn't. The "C" was for "collapsed voids", which was an odd feature I thought I had discovered which might relate to the holes/caves (I needed some explanation for the off caves/pits in this odd area).

Regarding the using of computer programs to search for anything in these images, it is in most cases really hard to do. What I was looking for was really easy, namely very black areas in the center of nonblack areas of a certain size. Searching for shapes, even just circles or lines is hard, but maybe someone is doing it. It boggles my mind how our eyes do it. But cameras have face recognition (they draw a circle//pattern around each face), so maybe clever people have got this figured out for other shapes. Anyway, I had to download all the jpeg browse version of the images which takes terrorbytes. ASU stores the uncompressed images which I avoid because they are too big and I can't see them being any better than jpeg browse products. Even the regular jpegs take alot of Internet bandwidth to download.

Regarding people deleting/editting out interesting things in images, I do not think this makes sense because they wouldn't post them on the Internet first. I don't think lunar scientists can agree what things are anyway. Take a boulder for instance, at a certain resolution it can look like a car, but at a finer resolution it is a collection of rocks. This is the nature of better resolution.

But it is fun to look at LRO images for interesting things. You get a little sick of craters after a while, but boulder tracks and cracks/caves are great fun to find!

Found greetings, lunarcaveguy~

It is an honor to welcome you to our little home here! Your research has done so much to inspire and educate so many people. .

I hope you will not mind a few questions regarding this incredible subject. Our friend, Copernicus, has introduced the subject you have spent so much time investigating, and there are a few that come here to learn more.

Again, thank you for joining us, and for some amazing and important research.

~Jackie~

Hello lunarcaveguy (James!), and welcome!!

It's good to have a pro around to keep everyone on track (or on cave, as the case may be)

I must say I agree about the eyes blurring part when looking at all of the images, and the size of the files is starting to build up pretty big, as well. Interesting that you have access to JPG's... are they standard ones or do you need a special program to view them?

Your letter designators... I understood them (at least as a non-geologist) but still found them a bit confusing, hence the gentle dig at them

Ah, (on your programme), so if you want to look for big stuff, change the parameters... small stuff and have fun checking the thousands of hits!

And thank you very much for your description of the "unknown object"! As soon as I read it I checked the image, and , I could see what you said right away! I don't how I could have not seen it in the first place! Visual perception can be strange sometimes!

It's funny, I haven't been specifically looking for caves lately, but I still found a very nice tunnel candidate in Copernicus a few days ago. I would've already posted it, but the next LROC dump is in a few days, so I thought I'd wait until after that to post it. I think it fits in with your formal cave description, James.

Again, glad to have you with us lunarcaveguy!!

C

Thank you for your kind welcomes.

I am glad there are people interested in this besides me! I will answer what questions I can, but I am no lunar scientist. Still, it seems they do a certain amount of guesswork and speculation.

Regarding the jpgs, I misremembered. They are the tiffs in the browse part of the ASU PDS data repository. Those tiffs have the interesting property of being jpeg compressed. I was remembering that jpeg compression since I had been frustrated for a while to not have a FORTRAN code to decompress it. What I do is use an image processing program to scale it down to a managable size to search for caves (factor of ten I think) and save it to uncompressed tif for analysis. I really want to analyze the unscaled, uncompressed images instead, but for hard drive limitations, I must uncompress as I search and I have been stymied so far.

The cave search algorithm I wrote works with lots of help of my eye. You are right that the larger the object, the less false positives. But caves so far have a certain size so I am stuck with the large number of false positives. Still, it is interesting to go through them, like searching for gold flecks when panning for gold. I have found a number of other interesting things that I have posted on Moon Zoo.

Yes, I really like unknown object for some reason. I guess its because it suggests a nice skylight underground lighting up hopefully a chamber. In the Lord of the Rings movie (the first one), when they were underground in Moria, a beam of light shown down into the room where the old dwarvish kings held court. Thats what it reminds me of.

Note that the upcoming Cave Workshop had a paper which shows the cave I found. No credit attributed to me, but then they might have discovered it before me and waited to report it. I think they must have known about these features enough to take so many images of the area. But they never published them. We have no formal reporting method for caves and since I am not a lunar scientist, cannot issue a press release or statement. The paper also alludes to the collapsed sinks. The most interesting fact is that they say they have found over 100 of them (likely not just in Copernicus crater).

"Collapse features over areas of melt pond drainage suggest additional sublunarean voids. Both types of cave offer intriguing exploration and habitation opportunities."
Ashley J. W. * Robinson M. S. Hawke B. R. Boyd A. K. Wagner R. V. Speyerer E. J. Hiesinger H. van der Bogert C. H.
"Lunar Caves in Mare Deposits Imaged by the LROC Narrow Angle Cameras" [#8008]
Since I can't post links yet, these links are at Moon Zoo under JFIncannon's collapsed voids.

Hi James/LCG,

Thank you for the links... and they never even referred to H1 as H1, either! By the way, links will work automatically if you post them on a line by itself.

So you used the P-Tiffs, and they're actually jpeg compression of some sort. It must be a different type of jpeg, because renaming it a jpg doesn't make it openable with progs that can handle an image that size.

Hmmm... I think you need to tell your IT guy that you need 20TB of drive space, then you can convert to BMP and run your app against them uncompressed.

C