The Rocky Mountain Trench

In western Canada, rumor has it that the Rocky Mountain Trench is so large that it is visible from the Moon. The story goes that one of the Apollo astronauts in lunar orbit radioed back to Mission Control to ask about the straight line he saw cutting across northwestern North America. “It turns out that is not even remotely true,” said Ben Gadd, a naturalist and author of the Handbook of the Canadian Rockies. When NASA historians checked all of the Apollo transcripts for references to a feature like the Rocky Mountain Trench, they found nothing. The Moon is so far from Earth (363,000 kilometers or 226,000 miles) that it is not possible to distinguish such a feature with the naked eye.

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The image is divided horizontally by an undulating line between a cloudscape forming a nebula along the bottom portion and a comparatively clear upper portion. Speckled across both portions is a starfield, showing innumerable stars of many sizes. The smallest of these are small, distant, and faint points of light. The largest of these appear larger, closer, brighter, and more fully resolved with 8-point diffraction spikes. The upper portion of the image is blueish, and has wispy translucent cloud-like streaks rising from the nebula below. The orangish cloudy formation in the bottom half varies in density and ranges from translucent to opaque. The stars vary in color, the majority of which have a blue or orange hue. The cloud-like structure of the nebula contains ridges, peaks, and valleys – an appearance very similar to a mountain range. Three long diffraction spikes from the top right edge of the image suggest the presence of a large star just out of view.

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