{"id":404,"date":"2015-04-23T20:17:06","date_gmt":"2015-04-23T19:17:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.masdingastronomy.com\/?page_id=404"},"modified":"2016-10-26T22:03:34","modified_gmt":"2016-10-26T21:03:34","slug":"humboldtianum","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.masdingastronomy.com\/?page_id=404","title":{"rendered":"Lunar science"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/a>Lunar polarisation<\/h1>\n

Over the last 7 years Andrew Fearnside, Chris Hooker and I have been working on a project to measure the polarisation of moonlight. The fact that moonlight is polarised has been known for nearly 100 years but interpreting what that means has always been difficult.<\/p>\n

During this project we discovered that the polarisation can tell us about the refractive index of the moon rocks and hence provide important information about their composition.<\/p>\n

This work was written and published in Icarus<\/a> which is journal devoted to solar system studies. Here is a link to our paper:<\/p>\n

Polarimetry of moonlight: A new method for determining the refractive index of the lunar regolith<\/a><\/p>\n

There is description of the work on the Manchester University website\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

The image featured on the Manchester University site shows the refractive index of the Marius Hills region. Below you can see I have created an interactive 3D version of that image using X3D. The moon is actually pretty flat so I have exaggerated the vertical scale by a factor of 6.<\/p>\n