Would you like to name a crater ... perhaps crater Smith or Jones?

This lovely little crater (above) pictured by the skilful Professor Ricardo Vaz Tolentino is called unofficially Ching-Te.

Ching-Te is a tiny impact crater of simple morphology, which is located west of the famous Taurus Littrow Valley, which was the landing site of the last mission of the Apollo program (Apollo 17).

The landing point is about 20 ­kilometres from Ching-Te, so some of its ejecta may have been sampled by Apollo 17.

According to the altimetric profile of QuickMap, the crater is 3.5 kilometres in diameter, and 670 metres deep.

And, next Wednesday night we have one of the spectacular total Moon eclipses over Maitland.  

It begins as a partial eclipse at 8.18pm and proceeds to a total lunar eclipse at 9.27pm the blood Moon of Shakespeare fame.

The next total lunar eclipse will be in June 2018 so cut out this article and put it on the fridge.  

A view of a total lunar eclipse from a dark area is most ­dramatic.

From Michigan USA and the Down Under Observatory superb astrophotographer Terry Hancock sends this picture (below) of the nebulae M16,17 and 18 with M24 in the Sagittarius region of the central Milky Way.

Terry writes: Image details, this 4 panel Hubble Palette Mosaic will be my last addition to this area until 2015. Covering an area of sky equal to 4 x 7 degrees, this image is 3714 pixels high x 6864 pixels wide.

Captured over eight nights from my backyard observatory close to Fremont, Michigan using QHY11/Takahashi E-180.

Sagittarius and these panel objects are sinking in the west just after 9pm from the Maitland perspective.