En vivo
The Moon · Crater · 1873rd largest named feature

Gaston

French male name.

What Gaston is

Gaston is a crater — a circular depression, almost always an impact scar — on The Moon, 2 km across, centred at 30.9° N, 34.0° W in the Aristarchus quadrangle. It is the 1873rd largest named feature on The Moon and the 1537th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

French male name. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1979, under the theme it applies to every crater on The Moon. Of the 1615 features of this class catalogued on The Moon, the naming categories run Germany (234), American (229), France (163), Great Britain (160).

Feature class
a circular depression, almost always an impact scar
Diameter
2 km
about 2.0 times a 10-minute walk
Coordinates
30.9° N, 34.0° W
Planetocentric, on The Moon
Name approved
1979
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Aristarchus
Map sheet on The Moon
Naming category
France
Europe

What it would take to settle Gaston

The Moon scores 29.1 as a world. That number is the same for every square metre of it — but sunlight, water, radiation and the ground under your feet are not. This is the same question asked at 30.9° N, 34.0° W.

Settlement difficulty here
27.9/ 100
Typical for this world
The Moon overall
29.1
1.2 easier than the median site
Ranked
668th
of 2,023 named places on The Moon

What this spot has going for it is earth link near side — Earth stands 45° above the horizon and never moves. What works against it is water outside the ice-bearing latitudes.

Computed from Gaston's catalogued latitude, longitude and feature class — 84% of the model's weight had a basis here, and one axis was dropped as not applicable to The Moon (radiation geometry). Gravity, pressure, delta-v and distance from the Sun are the same everywhere on The Moon and are already counted in the world's own index, not again here.

What this cannot see: elevation. Slope, local shadowing and the polar “peaks of eternal light” — ridge tops near the poles of a barely tilted world that catch sun almost continuously while a crater floor kilometres away never does — need a terrain model this does not have. Where a real mission targets a pole, that is usually why.

What is next to it

The largest crater features on The Moon

All 1,615 craters on The Moon — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.