Take a Tour of the Moon in Beautiful 4K With This Great Video

NASA recently released this stunning tour of the moon based on photos and visualizations built from data sent back from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft. It's a beautiful and informative look at our nearest neighbor.

Coming to you from David Ladd and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, this 4K tour of the moon will show you the near and far sides of the moon, north and south poles, the Apollo landing sites, and more. The LRO was launched in June 2009, and since then, it's created a three-dimensional map of 98.2 percent of the lunar surface at 100-meter resolution (higher in some areas, such as the 0.5-meter resolution of the Apollo landing sites), the only areas it's missed being the poles, which are in very dark shadows. Altogether, the LRO Camera has sent back somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 TB of image data in its nine years thus far, giving scientists a veritable treasure trove of information to work with. The LROC actually consists of three cameras: two narrow angle cameras with effective focal lengths of 700mm and apertures of f/3.59 and a wide angle camera with an effective focal length of 6.0 mm (4.7mm UV) and f/5.05 (f/5.65 UV). You can view more stunning imagery from the mission here.

Alex Cooke's picture

Alex Cooke is a Cleveland-based portrait, events, and landscape photographer. He holds an M.S. in Applied Mathematics and a doctorate in Music Composition. He is also an avid equestrian.

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3 Comments

Very cool!

That footage is beyond impressive. There are craters upon craters upon craters, and just when you think there's no more detail, there are micro craters.

I've personally always found our moon rather dull. It looks the same in B&W as it does in color, and have little visual interest to offer.

I would take Europa or Titan any day of the week :-)

Damn, crazy stuff...thank you for sharing..:)