Go Look At The Moon!

This is the coolest thing online I've seen in a long time. A team of amateur astronomers took over 1000 pictures of tiny areas of the Moon. 288 of them were chosen and mosaiced together. They describe the result far better than I do:

The end result is a high resolution 87.4 megapixel image of the Moon, larger even then previous images taken by some of the world's largest observatories, allowing features as small as 1km to be clearly seen.

This is the world's record for the largest mosaic of the Moon ever made, and it's available for you to view in full detail (!) at their site, Lunar World Record 2009. Go to the image page, and you should see this:

What's incredible is that you can zoom in.

And in.

And in, at ridiculously high resolution.

Do you see those things that look like dried up rivers emanating from that crater in the highest-resolution image on the lower left? That looks like a possible glacier path to me! Does anyone know what that feature is?

Clearly, I am having so much fun (and spending so much time) playing with this "virtual astronomy" toy! So go play. Go.

More like this

"But now it's gettin' late And the moon is climbin' high. I want to celebrate See it shinin' in your eye." -Neil Young The full Moon, beautiful as it is, isn't really all that rare!
Blue Moon You knew just what I was there for You heard me saying a prayer for Someone I really could care for... -Richard Rodgers & Lorenz Hart
"The supermoon is a 16-inch pizza compared with a 15-inch pizza. It's a slightly bigger moon; I ain't using the adjective 'supermoon.'" -Neil deGrasse Tyson
The Sun stood still and the Moon stayed -- and hastened not to go down about a whole day! -Joshua 10:12-13

I went. I played. Wow. What this tool needs is a way to identify the co-ordinates of what you have zoomed in upon. I want to pass on a feature I found... so I made an image and uploaded to my picasaweb album. See line of craters. It looks a little bit like your gully, but it has a line of depressions at one end, as if a large bouncing ball made the depressions and then rolled a bit further. Curious.

That is so cool! I did get it stuck on the fourth zoom but a refresh sets it back to start. One can also zoom out to a tiny moon (moonlet?).

By NewEnglandBob (not verified) on 08 Jul 2009 #permalink

The "channel" is a rille. Check Wiki or with lunar and planetary person.

That's a rille. They're likely collapsed lava tubes or the result of dike intrusions. Some people think they could be tectonic extensional features.

Hadley Rille - Apollo 15 landing site - probably the coolest of the Apollo sites.

By Dave Gill (not verified) on 08 Jul 2009 #permalink

WoW! That's so fantastic! I was walking on the moon. And I think that I know where I will buy the house;) Really fantastic page and congratulations for creators!

Just had a wonderful idea: Google Moon

You could zoom in to lunar formations and interactively get their names and selenographic coordinates.

advokat bergen
I really should get back into actual observing. I can afford about any scope Meade or Celestron makes at this point in my life. Iâd like to hook up a CCD and a computer to do time exposures and image stacking and whatnot, but I just donât have the oopmh to get going on it.

By mediahuset (not verified) on 14 Jan 2011 #permalink