Wednesday 8 July 2009

LRO, first images from the Moon

These pictures from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter were released a few days ago but lack of time has made me slow posting.

They were taken just at sunrise so the shadows are deep and only high ground is illuminated (or is it sunset? North is down in these photos the Sun is to the left and the Moon rotates once a month and blah... I can't visualise it just now).

But get this, the field is a 1400m square. That's a lot less than a mile across, and the LRO hasn't got down to its final orbit yet. Nowhere near. At a guess the two craters with brightly lit rims; a bit to the right, above and below the center line, are round about 50m across. This is just a test of the systems. The best is yet to come.

Investigate below the belt for another photo and a movie!



And the good people at the Goddard Space Center have assembled a movie. Oooo!

NASA | HD Lunar Flyover of the First Images from the LRO Camera

2 comments:

yorksnbeans said...

I don't know about you, but that first photo looks eerily like a silhouette of a woman's boob with a major chapel hat peg. :-)

Andy Holroyd said...

'Shid nipples lark chaplatpegz'
I see you are familiar with the Yorkshire idiom. 'Thalbi laiking abaht dahn t'ginnel afooar serlong'.