Geological Chronicle
Situated in the heavily cratered southern highlands on the near side of the Moon, Orontius is an impact crater measuring 121.02 kilometers in diameter. It is located northwest of the prominent ray crater Tycho and south and east of the large walled plain Deslandres. The crater was named after the sixteenth-century French mathematician and cartographer Oronce Fine.
Overlapping impacts have heavily degraded the structure of Orontius, leaving little of its original wall nearly intact. The eastern part of the crater is overlain by the smaller crater Huggins, which is overlain in turn on its eastern rim by Nasireddin, forming a crater chain of diminishing dimensions. Saussure joins the southern rim, while Pictet lies to the southwest.
The rim of Orontius is battered, worn, and breached to the west by a pair of intruding craters that produce inward bulges. While the south and southwestern rim sections have survived erosion better than the rest of the wall, the northern floor contains the distorted oval of Orontius F. Across the southwest half, the floor remains fairly flat and marred only by a few small craterlets.