"Luna" August 1998
Mount Schneckenberg
The Spiral Mountain
On browsing through The Amateur Astronomer's Photographic Lunar Atlas by Henry Hatfield (Lutterworth Press, 1968) one's eye gets caught from time to time by an unfamiliar feature labelled on the simple line-drawn maps. Hatfield relied on the Moon maps by Wilkins and Moore to derive the names of the lunar features, but some are not the officially designated International Astronomical Union (IAU) approved names. For instance, Messier A is labelled W H Pickering (see my observational drawing on page 4). Of course, many of the features given a single letter designation by Hatfield have since been given a proper name by the IAU. Also, Hatfield's classical East and West orientations were reversed by the IAU in 1961 to suit "astronautical convention".
In the southwest quadrant of Map 1 of Hatfield's atlas in the Mare Vaporum, lying to the north of the Hyginus Rille, sits a feature named Mt Schneckenberg, according to Hatfield.
On further investigation, I found a description of Schneckenberg in The Moon by Percy Wilkins and Patrick Moore (Macmillan, 1961):
"North of Hyginus and connected by a wide but shallow valley is a curious spiral mountain (Schneckenberg). This has broad low walls and the interior is depressed only about 700 feet. Schmidt and Goodacre drew a central craterlet, but Brenner and Fauth many more. Wilkins found two craterlets and a hill on the interior, all difficult objects. Krieger, in his Mond Atlas, Vol. I, Pl. 8, depicts the interior as filled with shadow except for a central strip, on which is a pit. Anther drawing, under a higher angle of illumination, shows two pits, from the more northerly of which a branching cleft runs north-east. Krieger also found other delicate clefts, confirmed in part by Fauth and Klein."
It is fortunate that the name Mt. Schneckenberg hasn't been adopted by the IAU - in fact, the feature still has no name - but the odd looking spiral nature of this massif remains there to be observed. The spirality of Schneckenberg resembles a plan view of a spiral galaxy, and not (as many people are led to believe by the descriptions) a tightly-wound spiral peak of walnut whip proportions!
