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

[RedSky]

On Apollo 12 there are those well know images taken from Surveyor looking back up the slope to the LM. But I've never seen any from the LM area into the crater showing Surveyor. The closest I've been able to find is possibly this panorama... where just poking up from the shadowed interior, just above the near side sunlit lip of the crater is something that looks like the solar panel (on top of the mast... which is below the lip). Don't know if that's it, but it looks like a hard edges of the right shape.

http://moonpans.com/vr/apollo12_lm.htm

(You need quicktime to view the 360 pan)

[dvandorn]

On Apollo 12 there are those well know images taken from Surveyor looking back up the slope to the LM. But I've never seen any from the LM area into the crater showing Surveyor. The closest I've been able to find is possibly this panorama... where just poking up from the shadowed interior, just above the near side sunlit lip of the crater is something that looks like the solar panel (on top of the mast... which is below the lip). Don't know if that's it, but it looks like a hard edges of the right shape.

Yes, that's the Surveyor in that pan. I've only seen two images of the Surveyor Crater, which include the Surveyor, taken from the LM landing site, both taken during EVA-1 pans. The one you linked is the better of the two, you can actually make out not only the solar panel and antenna (which were in sunlight), but also the triangular shape of the landing gear structure. The Sun was only about 5 or 6 degrees above the horizon during Apollo 12's first EVA, so the shadow of the crater rim fell about one-third of the way down Surveyor's antenna/solar panel mast.

The other image, from approximately the same perspective, was taken with a higher F-stop and the shadowed portion of the crater shows much less detail. In that picture, only the solar panel and antenna are visible, you can't see anything of the landing gear structure.

Of course, the human eye has a much greater dynamic range than the film stock used during Apollo (or any film stock, for that matter). When Pete Conrad took three steps to clear the LM and look back into the Surveyor Crater, just after he stepped onto the surface, he could clearly see the entire probe, even though most of it was in shadow. (It was illuminated by light backscattered from the opposite, sunlit crater wall.) That's why he cackled, almost immediately after setting foot on the surface, "Guess what I see sitting on the side of that crater?"

-the other Doug