Panoramic Photos From The Apollo Missions

Ant writes "This link lets you experience the moon just as the Apollo missions' astronauts did -- almost as you were there -- with QuickTime panorama views. Less known is that during all the missions they made image sequences which with todays computer technics can be stitched together into 360-degree interactive panoramas giving you the possibility to view the moon almost as you were there. Many of these panoramas have been published before, but in low resolution and displayed in small sizes. During the last year the original films have been rescanned in large resolution and the Apollo 11 images were released the week before the 35 year anniversary."

Looking at the moon with the VLT

[mindpixel]

The most amazing sight I have ever seen I saw standing on the nazimuth platform of one of the VLT unit telescopes. There was no instrument for that particular focus, so the Paranal opticians made a ground glass plate more than a meter in diameter and mounted on the telescope as a projection screen. When pointed at the full moon, the 8.2 meter primary mirror projected the moon about a meter in diameter at infinite resolution. To see the moon a meter in diameter, without this system, one would have to be in a lunar insertion orbit...