Graphical map for exploring Apollo landing sites

June 28, 2002  |  Edward Tufte
8 Comment(s)

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Topics: E.T.
Comments
  • Edward Tufte says:

    Dr. Dan Durda has created a superb website http://www.boulder.swri.edu/~durda/Apollo/landing_sites.html showing multiple scaled views of Apollo landing sites on the moon.

  • Terry McIver says:

    Would not the all-powerful Hubble telescope be able to see the hardware left
    on the moon?

    As you know, some are still skeptical that we even went there. NASA may not
    want to dignify the question by providing the evidence, but beyond that,
    wouldn’t it be interesting…TM

  • Ellis Vener says:

    The problem with using the Hubble to look at the Earth’s moon is that the moon is
    both too bright (proximity to sun and to telescope) for the sensors and too close to
    focus on.

  • Peter Lauterbach says:

    I also thought this was the case, but found the following in
    the Hubble Space Telescope gallery:

    http://hubblesite.org/gallery/showcase/solar_system/p9.shtml

  • David A. Smith says:

    It would be nice to have a scale. All craters, big and small, look the same to me.

  • Jeff Heinzelman says:

    An interesting visualization of the Apollo mission..

    Football

  • Michael McDougall says:

    Google supplies a Moon version of its Map application

    https://www.google.com/moon/

    Like the Earth version, it supports zooming in and out. You can also overlay charts and elevation data.

    For example, this shows the same Apollo 11 landing site illustrated in
    the football diagram:

    https://www.google.com/moon/#lat=0.655742&lon=23.471243&zoom=18&apollo=

  • Steve Sprague says:

    Related to this thread is Michael Light’s series of photographic prints published in his book Full Moon (Knopf, 1999). He obtained permission from NASA to work with the original photographic master negatives from the Moon missions and then printed them using the best digital printing processes available. I recall seeing a traveling exhibition of these prints a few years back and the best of them were quite stunning; several composite images of landing and exploration sites were 15 or 18 feet wide and sparklingly clear. Most likely as close as I’ll ever get to walking on the Moon. The book is available in a couple of formats and there is a selection of prints on permanent exhibit at the America Museum of Natural History in New York. One can get more information at http://www.michaellight.net.

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