Sometimes flows of material on the Moon are made of light-colored material, sometimes they’re made of dark-colored material. This is definitely an example of the latter! This is a small portion of a Narrow-Angle Camera image taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, showing detail of “low-reflectance” granular material sliding down the wall of a crater…
Category: The Moon
July 31: Birthday for Lunar Images!
On this day in 1964 NASA’s Ranger 7 became the first US spacecraft to capture close-up images of the Moon’s surface. The first image, shown here, was 1,000 times clearer than anything ever previously seen. The spacecraft, launched on July 28, 1964, arrived at the Moon three days later and turned on its cameras 17 minutes…
One Year of Moon
Can’t see the video below? Click here. This awesome animation by the visualization folks at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center shows the phases and position of the Moon throughout 2011 – a full year of the Moon compressed into 2.5 minutes! What’s really interesting is how you can see the wobble of the Moon in…
When We Left Earth
“It’s tiny out there…it’s inconsequential. It’s ironic that we had come to study the Moon and it was really discovering the Earth.” – Bill Anders, Apollo 8 astronaut When We Left Earth is a fantastic six-part series by Discovery Channel that features hours of new footage from NASA and interviews with many of those personally…
Bounce and Flow
Dark flows run down the slopes of Stevinus A crater on the Moon in this detail of an image from the LRO’s camera. Large boulders that have rolled downhill appear to have interrupted the flow in at least one spot in this image. It’s still not exactly known whether these features in Stevinus A are…
Moonhenge
Long shadows are cast by sunlit boulders crowding a hill in Anaxagoras crater on the Moon. This image taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) shows an area known as an impact melt – a result of the original collision that created the 50-kilometer-wide crater. Because of the lack of obvious large impacts in…
From the LITD Archives: Sinking the Shot
Alan Shepard may have played some moon golf during his visit in 1971 but even he wouldn’t have been up to par with this course. 😉 This photo shows the trail of a house-sized (33-foot-wide) lunar boulder that has rolled downhill and come to rest inside the rim of a crater. The image was taken…
iseefaces…on the Moon!
This mound – with craters positioned facelike on its top, including a central peak crater – is located along the edge of the Moon’s Eddington crater, an ancient lava-filled basin on the central western limb. Imaged by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in January, this 1.5km-wide mound may be the remnants of a volcano. Or it…
High Above Hawaii
For a real weekend treat, check out this beautiful time-lapse video taken by a camera mounted on a catwalk on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) on Mauna Kea in – you guessed it – Hawaii. 🙂 (If you don’t see a video above, click here to watch on YouTube.) Wow…absolutely beautiful! Especially considering no fancy editing…
Look Inside a Lunar Crater
The crater shown above is located in the lunar highlands and is filled with and surrounded by boulders of all sizes and shapes. It is approximately 550 meters (1800 feet) wide yet is still considered a small crater, and could have been caused by either a direct impact by a meteorite or by an ejected…
Last Night’s Moon
Crescent Moon w/Earthshine, originally uploaded by Lights In The Dark. The Moon looked especially nice last night (April 5), crescent-lit at dusk and the rest illuminated by cool blue Earthshine! (That’s sunlight reflected off the Earth and onto the Moon…and then back to the Earth to our eyes!) The image above was taken without a…
Craters Young and Old
This image from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) shows two similarly-sized craters in the Oceanus Procellarum (“Sea of Storms”) region of the Moon – a large mare on the Earth-facing side, on the northwestern edge. One crater is surrounded and covered by boulders and debris, denoting its young age compared to the smooth,…
Lights in the Dark 