New view of Moon

The rim of the lunar crater Taruntius

This may be the sharpest image of the Moon ever taken from the ground.

It shows the edge of the 56 km-wide crater Taruntius, named after the Roman philosopher.

The site is about 700 km away from where the first men landed on the Moon, 33 years ago.

The image was taken by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) on 30 April.

It was made with the NAOS-CONICA adaptive optics camera mounted on the telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile.

Long shadows

The general location is the Eastern Hemisphere of the Moon, just north of the equator.

The Moon

The only natural satellite of Earth

The second brightest object in the sky after the Sun

First visited by the Soviet spacecraft Luna 2 in 1959

The first manned landing was on July 20, 1969

It is in the middle of the two major seas, Tranquillity and Fertility.

It is late in the day on the Moon and the Sun is low above the western horizon.

Within Taruntius, a newer crater called Cameron, about 10 km across, can be seen at the top of the picture.

The sunlit rim is surrounded by relatively flat terrain bordered by hills.

This is peppered by lots of much smaller craters.

Image courtesy of the European Southern Observatory.