What a difference half a century makes! This week marks 50 years since the Soviet Luna 9 spacecraft made humanity’s first-ever soft landing on the surface of the Moon. Launched from Baikonur on Jan. 31, 1966, the Luna 9 lander touched down within Oceanus Procellarum at 18:44:52 UTC on Feb. 3. Over the following three days Luna 9 sent us our first views of…
Tag: luna
A December Moon
The midnight hour on December 11, 2011 brought a bright and vibrant halo around the Moon, not even 24 hours after its much-publicized total eclipse. It was all I could do to get my camera set up in time to snap a few photos; within the hour clouds rolled in and the effect was gone!…
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…
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…
Lights in the Dark 