daily pictures of Earth's moon

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Copyright: Lunar Picture of the Day

image by Nikolakakos Panagiotis, Sparta, GreeceAn airplane a few kilometers overhead is big against the Moon, but what can we see of vehicles on and near the Moon? The short answer is nothing from Earth. Excellent resolution of features on the Moon with Earthly telescopes is still 500 m or more; it will be a [...]

image by Павел Пресняков (Pavel Presnyakov), Kiev UkraineYesterday’s LPOD dramatically showed a low Sun view over eastern Mare Fecunditatis, with lines of secondary craters converging off camera. Here is the crater that those lines point back to and whose ejecta formed the pits. Langrenus is a fairly young impact crater, with rays still visible under [...]

image by Domenico Licchelli,Gagliano del Capo, ItalyAn interplay of mare ridges and secondary crater chains dominate this piece of the Moon. The secondaries are easy to explain - they come from Langrenus, which is off the image to the bottom right. The secondary craters align along the rays that are visible at higher Sun angles. [...]

image by Jérôme Grenier, Paris, France.The Marius Hills region has the greatest concentration of volcanoes on the Moon, and the morphology of the volcanoes is different from ones elsewhere. This image by Jérôme shows one thing about the Hills that is not normally recognized. The ridge visible on the top left of the image and [...]

image from eBayRarely does an original Moon map from the 18th century appear on the market. This is a famous one by Doppelmayr that is being auctioned on eBay - the bid is now $810 and you have until about 3 PM Thursday if you want to make an offer. This is the Moon sheet [...]

image by Bob PilzThis isn’t an inspiring piece of lunar landscape. Its the marshy southern shore where Mare Fecunditatis runs onto highland terrain that apparently lacks strong structural control. Its exactly the sort of place that people don’t image often enough, and it must have stories hidden away to tell us. First, what is that [...]

Apollo 15 M2525 image from LPI Apollo Image Atlas Looking due south, an Apollo 15 crewman (Al Worden?) clicked away with his Hasselblad camera as the ship came around the eastern limb of the Moon. For completeness, the crater in the foreground - Holden - must be identified, but what is really fascinating is the [...]

image by François Emond, Hautes-Alpes, FRANCE.Although there have been about 1,200 LPODs, not every one of the 1,229 nearside named features has had its own page. The problem is that a handful of craters grab attention, so that every imager has their personal best Plato, Clavius, Copernicus, Gassendi, Tycho and Theophilus, all of which are [...]

image from Map-A-Planet ExplorerI use Map-A-Planet nearly every day. This US Geologic Survey website is the easiest way to access the Clementine images, giving either black and white or false color views of anyplace on the Moon. Now there is a new interface for MAP and more importantly, a long awaited new data set. [...]

Well, this new set of beautiful pictures of the Earth seen around the limb of the Moon from space was just crying out to be made stereo! I just tipped it on its side, and pasted on a duplicate set of images, slid down one! It’s great! Not only do we see the Earth, behind [...]

Clementine images from USGS Map-A-Planet The colors of craters rays on Clementine images are like a bursting firework display preserved on the lunar surface. There was a big explosion sometime in the last billion years as a projectile crashed into the edge of Mare Fecunditatis and excavated the crater Petavius B. These two Clementine images [...]

image from Mare Vaporum Quadrangle, made by Don Wilhelms, 1968.Two days ago, before being wondrously interrupted by the newest Kaguya image, we investigated the Hyginus Rille using the spacecraft-like image from Wes Higgins. But we aren’t the first to look very carefully at this area. During the 1960s, US Geological Survey scientists mapped the lunar [...]

image from Kaguya/Selene spacecraft of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)The perfect ellipse of a crater, with sunlight just kissing its rim crest, is a future outpost for humanity: Shackleton crater at the lunar South Pole. The Kaguya spacecraft HDTV has captured its first breath-taking videos of the lunar limb as Earth rises and sets. [...]

image by Wes HigginsLast month, François Emond captured an amazing image of the Triesnecker and Hyginus rilles, revealing subtle features. Now Wes has imaged the area under a higher Sun, throwing more light on the rilles, and detecting some little known ones. “Little known” are weasel words for “these may be new discoveries, but I’m [...]

image by Alan FriedmanCompare Aristarchus and the adjacent Herodotus. Would 40 km wide, 3 km deep Aristarchus look like Herodotus (35 km wide, 1.3 km deep) if it had a 1.7 km filling of lava? That is the standard explanation for craters like Herodotus - they are just lava-filled normal impact craters. Many probably [...]

image by Don Higdon and Susan HobanThe Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, scheduled to launch in October 2008, will carry the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA). LOLA will produce topographic maps of the Moon using a LIDAR ranging system. We have developed a hands-on activity for middle and high school students that uses an ultra-sound motion [...]

image by Galileo spacecraft, enroute to JupiterIt used to be that the US could afford to build large rockets that would fly directly to their targets. But over the last few decades we have been forced to take long paths to other planets, relying on multiple passes near intervening planets to achieve our goals. A [...]

image by Howard Eskildsen, Ocala, Florida, Mercury at upper left and Spica at top.Well, actually more than a billion. Today the Moon is far enough from Earth that you can hide it behind your thumb held out at arm’s length. The Moon is receding from Earth and has been for 4.5 b.y. That means [...]

image from Kaguya/Selene spacecraft of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)Kaguya is a name we will all become very familiar with. Based on the first released images from the least sensitive scientific instrument on the Japanese lunar orbiter, we are in for a flood of wondrous new views of the Moon. The High Definition TV [...]

image by François Emond, Hautes-Alpes, FRANCE.Three days ago LPOD featured the best Earth-based image ever made of Aristillus. Now, another Aristillus image gives a different impression of what the crater is like. Today’s image by François was taken with lower Sun angle than Wes’ masterpiece, and that difference, and a different processing style, adds to [...]

image by Tony GondolaSome pictures are better to enjoy than to interpret. Tony’s recent view of the area north of Plato and Mare Frigoris is like that. With relatively high Sun, its a plain area of subdued topography, shades of gray giving way to the blackness of space. But splat, right in the middle, is [...]

image by Stefan Lammel, Uxbridge, England. The putative ray, from Gambart to Guericke.All fresh craters have rays, demonstrating that during the crater-forming process some rock fragments receive more energetic ejections than others. Did the formation of impact basins also create rays? I would expect so, but it is sort of hard to tell. Crater rays [...]

image by Wes HigginsEach increase in resolution or better view with a different lighting seems to reveal new things about the Moon. Wes’ superb image of the area around the young crater Aristillus reveals more about the lunar surface and raises more questions. The radiating rays and secondary crater alignments from Aristillus are clearly shown, [...]

image from Astronomical Society of the PacificMost board games are competitive - who can win the most money or points or get to the end first. And most have little content. The Moon Mission Game from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP) is a race, but it requires collaborative play to be successful, and [...]

image by Nikolakakos Panagiotis, Sparta, GreeceThis is a little late for Halloween but it seems like it comes directly from an old movie of ghosts and spooks and haunted castles - is that one on the horizon? This image has a wonderfully atmospheric feeling, with the huge Moon, ambiguous clouds and sepia tone. I like [...]