Asteroid TU24 smoothed image. 1500 megaton (APOD 30 Jan2008)

[Ace]

Yes, it can work ok. I've done it a few times with other images. The pixelated image was made by zooming in several times using the zoom tool in a photo editor which results in a pixelated photo. I assume they did that because the original unpixelated photo is so tiny to look at. They should just use the resize option like I did. It results in a better and more useful image as you can see here. Pixelated images like this one are pretty useless as far as i'm concerned.

[Ace]

here's another version I did if anyone wants to look at it:

http://www.4shared.com/file/36790326/75 ... nbank.html

it's better but a bit smaller. The crater on the left is more clear in this one. The smaller image in the pic would be roughly the size of the original i'm guessing. That's around the point where the pixelation goes away, at least to my eyes.

[Arramon]

"...an object of such great size that when it struck the Moon, ALL upon Earth would know and feel its impact."

Not human-, car-, or even baseball-sized meteors... but something catastrophic in size.

Of course, this hasn't happened in our time as humans, because we've all known the Moon as it's been for as long as our human eyes have been able to peer up, and it's still in one piece.

If an asteroid miles upon miles wide hit the Moon... oi! Possibly shattering it or breaking large chunks off. Light side, dark side, no matter. This entire region of space would be awash in the afterglow. But how large would the object need to be to cause such an event? And can scientists tell what the largest object may have been so far from the size of the craters upon the Moon's surface?

Those Chinese better be sending images of the darkside of the Moon when its in the light of the Sun so we can all see! =)

[neufer]

If an asteroid miles upon miles wide hit the Moon... oi! Possibly shattering it or breaking large chunks off. Light side, dark side, no matter. This entire region of space would be awash in the afterglow. But how large would the object need to be to cause such an event? And can scientists tell what the largest object may have been so far from the size of the craters upon the Moon's surface?

http://www.solarviews.com/eng/tercrate.htm
It seems to be a general rule of thumb that:
15 x Diameter of meteor ~ Diameter of crater

So the biggest "craters" observed today are caused
by (~4 billion year old) ~150km sized meteors:
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pole-Aitken_basin

<<The South Pole-Aitken basin is an impact crater on Earth's Moon. Roughly 2500 kilometers in diameter and 13 kilometers deep, it is the largest known impact crater not only on the Moon, but also in the entire solar system. >>
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellas_Planitia

<<With a diameter of about 2,300 km (1,400 mi), [Hellas Planitia] is the largest impact structure on Mars. The altitude difference between the rim and the bottom is ~9 km (30,000 ft). If all the material excavated from it were spread evenly on the continental United States, there would be a 3.5 km (12,000 ft) thick layer of debris. The basin is thought to have been formed during the Late Heavy Bombardment period of the Solar System, over 3.9 billion years ago, when a large asteroid hit the surface.>>
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http://tinyurl.com/3exxpy

<<This image shows details of [Mercury's] Caloris basin, one of the largest impact basins in the solar system. MESSENGER's images indicate that the basin rim, shown as a blue dotted line in the image, is [about] 1550 kilometers in diameter.>>
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[William Roeder]

Those Chinese better be sending images of the darkside of the Moon when its in the light of the Sun so we can all see! =)

Why would the darkside ever be lit? You meant farside, there is no darkside except in the force