Saturday, July 18, 2009

Way Cool....

This image, from the Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter, of the Apollo 14 landing site, in which you can see the LM, an instrument package, and the footpath where the astronauts walked:

This and more NRO Apollo images here.

I wish there were more of those.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi EK,

As the article promises, there'll be plenty more to come, including more of these sites at higher resolution. I can't wait.

This morning, I was watching this video of the CBS coverage of the Apollo 11 landing. That was the channel I watched when it happened. I was struck by several things. My recollection of the event was mainly like the beginning of the video - lots of stats overlaying the animation. I had forgotten that the animation was out of sync with the actual landing and that at the actual point of landing, there was nothing but the out-of-sync animation of the LM sitting on the surface on the screen. Also, I didn't recall the rough cuts to pictures of crowds watching the landing (was TV really that rough in those days?). And of course, the non-metric units mentioned kind of stand out these days. Even the Apollo 14 image you showed had a metric scale. Still, this video brings back some vivid, fond memories. Too bad Cronkite didn't live to see the anniversary Monday.

βPer

Eamon Knight said...

As the article promises, there'll be plenty more to come, including more of these sites at higher resolution. I can't wait.

I mean: I wish there were more such sites, more such footprints up there. I hope there will be more, before too long.

Too bad Cronkite didn't live to see the anniversary Monday.

There's an ironice poignancy there -- perhaps Cronkite's greatest moment as a broadcaster, and one of the brightest moments for the US, and the world, in the past 50 years.