NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio has published a unique new image of our moon’s surface with stunning detail.
The image is a mosaic of 1,231 separate images of the near side of the moon, taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).
The finished mosaic measures 12800×12800 pixels or 164 megapixels. It can be downloaded for free from NASA as a 72.9 megabyte file.
The individual images were all taken in the summer of 2018 by the LRO’s Narrow Angle Camera. A CCD camera attached to a telescope has a focal length of 700mm and can resolve the lunar surface to less than one meter per pixel.
Each single image is the best of that area, chosen from over 10,000 taken by the LRO, according to the best match of brightness and gradient.
What the mosaic doesn’t show is the other side of the moon. It is incorrectly referred to by some as the dark side of the moon, despite the fact that the waxing and waning is in the exact opposite way of the near side.
This montage of moon images was released to announce the recent release of the LRO’s image data for 2018:
Orbiting the moon since 2009, the LRO has now produced over a million gigabytes of image data, all of which is freely available.
The LROC website also has special features about the Apollo landing sites, as well as 21st century landing sites and even 21st century spacecraft impacts
But perhaps the most beautiful way to experience LRO’s incredible views of the lunar surface is in this YouTube video in which LRO images are set to Claude Debussy’s moonlight †Moonlight in English). It was shown during NASA’s 60th anniversary in 2018.
Several ultra-high-resolution images of the moon are now available online.
In 2011 – shortly after the LRO began work on the moon – a 24,000 x 24,000 pixel (576 megapixel) image was made available online for zooming in and for download in two versions (the largest being over a gigabyte). .
In 2017, the LRO team created the highest-resolution near-global topographic map of the moon ever. It shows the shape and features of the surface over almost the entire moon with a pixel scale of almost 100 meters. It is available online.
Another rarity that NASA has available online is a false-color composite of 15 images of the moon taken through three color filters by its Galileo spacecraft as it flew past the moon on its way to Jupiter in 1992.
Last year, astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy captured an 11,022 x 11,022 pixels (121 megapixels) image of the moon entitled “Waxing Through December.” It was posted on Reddit and thus is available online.
Also worth checking out yesterday’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, which features a composite of 48 photos of the moon in various colors taken by astrophotographer Marcella Giulia Pace.
I wish you a clear sky and big eyes.