Crater monitoring through social media observations

Abstract

Lunar craters have attracted the attention of not only scientists but also citizens. Modern high-resolution cameras with zoom capabilities allow citizens to capture and share pictures of the Moon in Social Media platforms, such as Twitter. We have collected 69 pictures of the Moon, from 01-01-2017 to 17-04-2017, that have been uploaded on Twitter and have been associated with the keyword #crater. The lunar pictures are indexed using SIFT descriptors and are then clustered using density-based approaches to group them into the automatically detected levels of zoom.