You mean like this?

Phil

UNNEEDED QUOTE REMOVED. RULE 3.5

The view is tremendous!

A thousand thanks for that panorama of Surveyor 7's lunar home.

I found intriguing the view in the mirror, as well as the large rock
near one of Surveyor 7's footpads.

Another Phil

Interpreting the Moon surface:

The moon regolith has no marks of aeolian erosion. It is interesting to compare it with ones with aeolian erosion (Earth and Mars). The surface looks like that this was punctured by a great amount of micrometeorites.

Nothing smooth surface but porous surface. The surface has no any sharps angles, the hills are curved, it is due that there has no erosion that makes the surface to be rougher and also it has very low gravity that does make the surface to have a sharper angle.

Also, the moon colors are monotonous: white and black, aren't?

Rodolfo

Actually, there IS erosion on the Moon, and it is that erosion which has removed its sharp corners -- namely, that same slow but continuous rain of high-speed micrometeoroids which has very gradually but consistently pulverized the surface, as it does on all airless and nonchanging worlds. The lack of sharp corners is due to the Moon's lack of geological activity, for the last several billion years, that might thrust up new surface features or fissure old ones with faults. The place has been literally "ground down" for eons. This is something which in retrospect should have been obvious to everyone from the beginning, but doesn't seem to have struck most scientists until Ranger 7 provided the first close-up views of lunar features and revealed all the Moon's smaller craters to be blunted and eroded.

And, yes, it is virtually colorless -- which is why the patch of "orangish soil", which turned out to be beads of volcanic glass, so startled the Apollo 17 astronauts.

Well... there *are* sharp and craggy features on the Moon, but they're at relatively small scales. There are tons of angular, sharp-edged rocks up there, ejected from relatively fresh craters. And there are new craters being made most every day, of various (usually rather small) sizes, that have pretty sharp rims. But because the vast majority of the rocks and craters have been softened by millennia of impact erosion, such sharp features do tend to stand out (and were immediately noticeable by the Apollo crews).

And there are colors on the Moon beyond the small patch of orange soil found at Taurus-Littrow. In overall coloration, the highlands have a very slight reddish tinge, while the maria have a very slight bluish tinge. And there are deposits of volcanic and impact glasses that are more brightly colored -- greens, yellows, oranges, reds and golds -- that occur on the surface in such small areal extents that they are only visible at small scales. (And it wasn't just the Apollo 17 crew that found colored glasses -- the Apollo 15 crew found light green glasses coating some rocks. But the coloration was so subtle that, while Irwin spotted it immediately, Scott remained convinced until he saw the samples back on Earth that the greenish cast was a function of the sun visors.)

These sharp and colored features are so subtle and relatively uncommon that the overall appearance of the lunar surface is, as you say, of an almost entirely colorless, softened gray expanse. But the overall impression isn't absolute, and on a planet the size of the Moon, you can find an exception to just about every rule.

-the other Doug

Even 2001: A Space Odyssey went for the old-fashioned craggy Moon, despite
knowing better by then. Arthur C. Clarke wrote about how the Moon's mountains
were smooth due to cosmic erosion in his 1964 Time-Life Science book Man and
Space, which he did in a moonlighting capacity while working with Stanley Kubrick
on developing the film. So they knew, but they went with 1960s pre-Apollo audience
expectations of the Moon. A little disappointing considering how often 2001 is touted
as being so accurate.

They did the same thing with the Discovery spacecraft, choosing aesthetics over
accuracy by not having any large vanes on the vessel which would be necessary
to remove excess heat from the nuclear engines. It made the ship look like it had
wings and that would have reduced the "coolness" factor of its look. So they
decided to let Discovery look cool while in reality it would have melted into a
radioactive pile of metal slush from all the heat buildup. Or would it have
exploded?

http://www.palantir.net/2001/

Has anyone out there in UMSF-land tried to stitch together mosaics from the
digital Lunar Orbiter photos that are now available from the USGS?

The images can be found at

http://cps.earth.northwester.edu/LO/index.html



Another Phil

Another Phil:

Your URL got truncated:

http://cps.earth.northwestern.edu/LO/index.html

The second 'n' got left out of 'northwestern'!

Interesting link, though...

Bob Shaw

I've got a few of the interesting Tif's coming down - I might have a play later.

Doug

Thought I'd have a bit of a play - and to be honest, I'm sure these images have been presented a thousand times before - but pretty pictures are pretty pictures

This is from LO3, two frames stitched from their scanning process.

Doug

Beautiful.

It's interesting that the Lunar Orbiters were phototelevision systems. I think that's the only time the Americans used that technology, but the Russians loved it. Somehow though, the Russian PTU images were always pretty messed up. I know from Zond-8 that they had splendid cameras (those were film-return missions). But when they tried to develop and scan the images, they were scratched up and had pretty bad contrast. I've played a little with the Mars-5 images, and you can make nice pictures, but it takes work.

The Lunar Orbiter photo system was borrowed practically without any change from our Samos film-scanning reconnaissance satellites (and I believe there was some fuss at the time about the fact that we might be revealing the details of the latter to the Soviets, although I don't know what else we could have done).

Great work on the LO3 image!

There is another source of digitally scanned Lunar Orbiter photographs
located here.

http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/Projects/Luna...statusmaps.html


As you will notice, there is a clickable map of the Near Side and one for the Far Side
of the Moon at that site. Is it possible to produce a stitched mosaic of part of the Far
Side utilizing some of the Lunar Orbiter frames listed on that map? My favorite
sectors would be Mare Orientale, the area around the Korolev basin, as well
as the area near the Apollo basin.

In addition, back at the original site, listed earlier at

http://cps.earth.northwestern.edu/LO/index.html

it would be interesting to see a stitched mosaic of the high resolution frames, from
Lunar Orbiter 3, of one of the candidate Apollo landing sites. The Lunar Orbiters
produced such magnificent photographs, but, I believe, have not been appreciated
recently because, for so long, they were not available in a digital format. Now that
we are headed back to the Moon, perhaps they will be utilized once again to prepare
for future landings, even in the age of the LRO.


Another Phil

Ah, interesting. The Russians also had a phototelevsion camera (called Baikal) in some early Zenit satellites, but got rid of it. Nothing beats film return for quality. Well maybe some of the modern 100,000 element push-broom cameras do, but I believe we still keep a few film return satellites in orbit for special purposes.

There's a lot on this in NASA's official 1977 history of Lunar Orbiter, "Destination Moon". I also remember reading about it somewhere more recently, but I can't remember the damned source -- it might well be JBIS, given their detailed coverage of space history.