Lunar Spacecraft Images, A place for moon panoramas, mosaics etc. Options

[Phil Stooke]

As promised in another thread... I thought all the images from Surveyor, Apollo etc. needed another place to go than the Mars Forum.

I will start the thing off with a link, not an image. I occasionally have images in Chuck Wood's Lunar Picture of the Day (LPOD) website, www.lpod.org.

This URL:

http://www.lpod.org/LPOD-2005-05-25.htm

is my latest, a Clementine LWIR mosaic. The text accompanying the image explains how I made it. LWIR images from the PDS look useless but they can be made into very nice image strips. In most areas of the Moon they are the highest resolution images available, since the HIRES camera only functioned well over near-polar latitudes. So image junkies who want to see new scenery emerge from their computers can go wild!

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

The possible Ranger 6 ejecta deposit is dark in thermal IR, meaning it's cool (and by extension, so am I), but in visible light it's bright. This like all fresh crater deposits may just be a texture effect.

We don't have a high res image here. Where we do - Rangers 7, 8, 9, Apollo 13, 14 SIVBs, Apollo 14 LM - the story is more confused. Generally there is a dark ejecta patch in visible, but Ranger 9 is bright and Apollo 14 SIVB has mixed bright and dark rays. It's not clear what is going on.

One problem is that the images my comments are based on are very different - Apollo pan and Hasselblad, Lunar Orbiter, Clementine IR. We would really benefit from having systematic coverage of all these sites at very high resolution, with similar illumination, from the same instrument. LRO should help with this.

Phil