Alex McColgan

This image has a few rather spectacular points of interest to see, the obvious one being this channel which cuts through the ground.

This section here is a lava vent, back when the moon was a lot more geologically active,

Running out of the vent, in a southwesterly direction, is something known as a rima, or a relay.

These are channels cut out by lava melting and eroding its way down the slope, kind of like a river on Earth.

To the east in this image, we see the crater rim of Plato.

Plato itself was likely filled with lava at some point, as the base is darker and smoother than the regions northwards.

However, in this image, we can see that a huge section of crust has collapsed down from the crater wall, creating a 24km wide slump block.

In other words, this section was once connected to the higher plane, however it has since collapsed under its own weight, breaking away and falling somewhat into the crater.

Let's have a look at one more crater.

This breathtaking view is from the Apollo 15 mission overlooking Aristarchus crater.

Aristarchus is seen towards the northwest of the moon, and although Aristarchus is only 40km across, it's bright enough to be seen with the naked eye.

From Apollo's viewpoint, we can see a really wide angled perspective of the crater.

Surrounding it are more relays and lava vents, and a small ray system can be seen extending away from the centre.

From this angle, with the shadow extruding out from the rim, we get a sense of how deep this crater is.

This complex crater has prominent crater walls, however the uplift found in the centre seems pretty small.

From LRO's perspective, we have a much higher resolution view of Aristarchus again, and we can have a close examination of the walls and crater base.

The walls are similar in appearance to Jackson crater,

However, looking at the peak towards the crater's centre reveals some major differences.

Not only is the peak much smaller, it also has a banded pattern, exposing layers in the crust that would have otherwise been hidden hundreds of metres down.

The base of the crater was also likely to have formed from molten lava, rock melted by the impactor.