Buys Ballot
What Buys Ballot is
Buys Ballot is a crater — a circular depression, almost always an impact scar — on The Moon, 66.4 km across, centred at 20.9° N, 174.8° E in the Fitzgerald quadrangle. It is the 725th largest named feature on The Moon and the 512th largest of its class there.
Where the name comes from
Christoph Hendrik Diederik; Dutch meteorologist (1817-1890). The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1970, 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).
What it would take to settle Buys Ballot
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 20.9° N, 174.8° E.
What this spot has going for it is sunlight — 93% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on The Moon gets. What works against it is water — outside the ice-bearing latitudes.
Computed from Buys Ballot'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.
Buys Ballot's satellite craters
The IAU names smaller craters around a major one by letter. Buys Ballot has 4, and each shares the parent's namesake rather than carrying one of its own.
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.