(Photo: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University )
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When you take 983 wide-angle shots of the Moon's north poll and stitch them together, you get this.
As reported by Space.com, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which has been making its way around the Moon since 2009, took the images. Although the image shows the craters spiraling outward from the poll, Mark Robinson, primary investigator of the team, said it's an optical allusion:
"Imagine a series of very narrow pie slices collected 12 times each day, one after another," Robinson told Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to SPACE.com. "It takes roughly 360 slices to fill in the whole pie. Each day the sun direction is progressing around the moon, thus the direction that the sun is striking the surface changes. So the shadow directions slowly progress around the moon, thus leading to the illusion."
Fun fact: The moon only tilts on its axis at 1.54 degrees (Earth: 23.5 degrees). Because of this, some parts of the moon don't ever see sunlight. The dark areas you see in the deep craters around the poll are probably always dark
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