Linné (crater)

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Linnaeus is an impact crater on the moon. It is named after the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus. The name comes from the German astronomer Johann Heinrich von Mädler and was built in 1935 by the International Astronomical Union ( IAU) officially defined.

Location

The crater is located in the western half of the Mare Serenitatis. His selenographic coordinates are 27 ° 42 'North and 11 ° 48 ' East.

Description

Linnaeus has a diameter of 2.4 kilometers and is 600 meters deep. The small crater has a sharp, circular edge and is surrounded by bright ejecta, whose ring has a diameter of up to 10 kilometers. In steeply incident sunlight it shines as a bright white spot. By this brightness equal to the large beam systems, it belongs to the younger structures.

Observation history

In the past, several observers have described several alleged changes the shape and size of the crater. They concluded that it is the crater of an active volcano.

In the 19th century it was observed, among others, Wilhelm Beer and Johann Heinrich von Mädler as a small but clear and deep crater, which had so far with the crater Bessel comparable, the largest crater in Mare Serenitatis. Beer and Mädler produced until 1837 with the help of a telescope with a 9.5 cm aperture width a decades unsurpassed detailed map of the moon on. She described in her book to published in the same year with the moon this as a dead, unchanging world. Johann Friedrich Julius Schmidt, who had the Linnaeus also called deep crater, was in 1858 director of the Athens Observatory and used there, the telescope with 18 cm aperture width for his lunar studies, which led to 1878 in a private and highly-detailed map of the moon. In 1866, he reported that the crater had suddenly disappeared and in its place instead, would be a white spot. This message led to a resurgence of lunar exploration.

Since 1843 no observation reports of Linnaeus were available more. For this period 1843-1866 was formerly mostly assumed that a moon quake could have destroyed the crater. The alleged changes have been hotly debated, and some astronomers led the crater until the middle of the 20th century as an example that the lunar surface was changing also in periods of human observation. A long dispute over the alleged volcanic activity lasted until the year 1967, when there were the first photos of lunar probes of the crater. Today is rather assumed that there was no disappearance and no other changes. The observation history of crater Linné stands as a classic example of how detailed observations at the resolution limit of the telescope lead to errors. The brightness of the court to Linnaeus varies depending on the light angle during the phases of the moon and the libration.

Because of the large conspicuousness of the high albedo Linnaeus counts in his region as the main crater; named after him craters, however, are all greater than he.

Secondary craters

The crater Linné E was renamed by the IAU in Banting in 1973.