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."

Comments

Now I wonder

[Quasar1999]

How they got panoramic shots of the fake moon set without getting any of the lights or equipment in the shots... ;)

Let the conspiracy theorists loose... this should be fun... ;)

Re:Now I wonder

[PepsiProgrammer]

The real mystery is why it took NASA only 7 years after jfk's speach in 62 to make it to the moon. But they estimate it will take 15 years here in 2005 to go again. I bet we could get up there in four years if we thought there was oil.

Re:Now I wonder

[Peyna]

The only way we will ever convince the skeptics is to load them all up in a rocket and send them their. In fact, that sounds like a real good idea.

Re:Now I wonder

[fm6]

Since the whole "back to the moon" thing is pure political flimflam, Bush has to say 15 years. If he said, 7 years, he'd have to make real progress while he's still President. This way he can just order a few bogus studies and projects, and claim to be the new JFK.

Re:Now I wonder

[Uhlek]

The Apollo missions, like most of our early space program, were largely a kludge, and, in some opinions, a huge waste of time and resources.

New technologies and PR aside, the Apollo program accomplished very little except getting some footprints on the moon. We'd focused all our energy on sending people to the moon, once that was accomplished, we were ten years behind in establishing a support base upon which to implement constant space exploration, and lack of motivation kept us slipping past that. We never really recovered, and today we aren't much further along than we were in 1962, except in terms of technology. The shuttle is of limited use, and the space station itself is nearly useless as an orbital base (thanks to its orbit and lack of any crew transfer mechanism except the oversized, over-expensive shuttle). Can't recall where I'd heard it, but there's a comparison to using the shuttle to get to the space station like using a semi to get to work. It's impractical, we need a small commuter car, and maybe an SUV for the mid-sized jobs as well.

That's not to say that nothing good came out of the Apollo program. But, we spent so much money on it that once we got there, the "now what" train of thought kicked in, and other programs that were less exciting (space lab, etc) received less funding.

Instead of rushing to the Moon, if we'd focused first on establishing a permanent orbital presense along with a small suite of multipurpose reusable spacecraft (large cargo units like the Shuttle, along with small crewboats for crew transfers), and *then* gone to the moon, we'd be a lot further along now than we are.

Hopefully, NASA is looking further ahead than the next "big thing". Slow and steady wins the race, and planting feet on Mars will be meaningless if we don't follow it up with a continuious presence, a goal we abandoned following Apollo.

Re:Now I wonder

[Mononoke]

The only way we will ever convince the skeptics is to load them all up in a rocket and send them their. In fact, that sounds like a real good idea.

Yes. We can put them in the B-Ark with all of the hairdressers and telephone-sanitizers.

Re:Now I wonder

[laughingcoyote]

Great idea!

I'm a skeptic! Can I go? Please?

Erm...I mean, prove it to me, you lying bastards.

Re:Now I wonder

[Michael_Burton]

I'm a skeptic! Can I go? Please?

Read the fine print, or you might overlook a crucial fact about the "Proof" mission: it's a one-way ride.

The Moon is a fascinating place, but it gets progressively less interesting as your oxygen runs out.

Re:Now I wonder

[FleaPlus]

The real mystery is why it took NASA only 7 years after jfk's speach in 62 to make it to the moon. But they estimate it will take 15 years here in 2005 to go again.

(copies old post)

Here are some good reasons for why it'll take longer this time:

1. They had pretty much all the funding they could possibly want during the space race. This time they don't have that luxury.

2. Much greater safety paranoia now. When the crew of Apollo 1 was killed, NASA fixed the problem and moved on with the program. They didn't paralyze their manned spaceflight program, go into a period of national mourning, and launch congressional investigation committees.

3. Von Braun and the other German rocket geniuses who essentially designed and built the rockets they used are just about all dead. Granted, there's some folks around who trained under them, but there's no one with their sheer amount of experience.

4. NASA is much more diversified now than it used to be. Back then, landing on the moon was their one and only goal, and they were able to focus all their resources towards achieving that goal. Nowadays, it's almost impossible to cancel old programs and refocus on something else, because some constituency is going to have NASA's head on a platter.

5. The last time around, all they cared about was getting on the moon. This time, we want to not only land a brief mission on the moon, but we want to create a permanent, self-sustaining settlement there. We want to be sure that the systems we develop are not just going to be suitable for a one-shot quick landing, but that they'll also be useful for a permanent moon settlement.

Re:Now I wonder

[Feztaa]

Your joke is of course funny, but you overlook the fact that this planet already IS the B-Ark... :(

Damn you Quicktime! Damn yoooooouuuu!

[theparanoidcynic]

By the time I reboot into XP or start my Mac that site will be toast.

Almost as I was 'there'?

[muntumbomoklik]

I've got a beer in my hand and three slices of pizza on a plate in front of me. I can also breathe without a helmet and can't bounce around.

So unless my version of Quicktime is missing a few extra plugins.....

Re:Obligatory conspiracy theorist comment

[Anonymous Coward]

Well there is more intellegent life on the moon than in Hollywood.

NYUD Links

[bucklesl]

Already slow...

http://www.panoramas.dk.nyud.net:8090/fullscreen3/ f29.html

Re:Damn you Quicktime! Damn yoooooouuuu!

[JudgeFurious]

(Doing my best Scotty voice)

"It's dead already!"

Plus if you do manage to open the website you'll flood the whole compartment.

With what? Hell if I know but it killed that server!

Re:Damn you Quicktime! Damn yoooooouuuu!

[sploo22]

By the time I reboot into XP or start my Mac that site will be toast.

I believe the future tense is uncalled for in this situation.

Very nice ...

[Fookin]

Ahhh ... watching the moon while listening to some Pink Floyd. How trippy! :D

Re:Very nice ...

[Tackhead]

> Ahhh ... watching the moon while listening to some Pink Floyd. How trippy! :D

And if the colo breaks down gigabytes too soon,
And if you cannot foot the bandwith bill,
And if your site explodes, slashdot the cached one too,
We'll see you on the dark side of the moon!

(I can't think of anything to say except... PWN3D! *snork*)

Re:Very nice ...

[Anonymous Coward]

"There is no dark side of Slashdot, really. As a matter of fact it's all dark..."

fading heartbeat...

Someone got the dept. mixed up

[bwcarty]

from the monty-have-you-heard-about-this-one dept

Timothy,
You're mixing two songs from R.E.M.'s Automatic for the People. The line from Man on the Moon is, "Andy, did you hear about this one?"

Monty is from track 7 (Monty Got a Raw Deal)...my personal favorite on the album.

Neil Armstrong said it best...

[Samrobb]

"That's one small click for a man, and a giant slashdotting for a completely unprepared webserver."

The Moon: A Ridiculous Liberal Myth

[Anonymous Coward]

It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a gigantic ball of rock happens to orbit our planet, showing itself in neat, four-week cycles -- with the same side facing us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the liberals have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, God-fearing Americans (as if any further evidence was needed! Daddy's Roommate? God Almighty!)

Documentaries such as Enemy of the State have accurately portrayed the elaborate, byzantine network of surveillance satellites that the liberals have sent into space to spy on law-abiding Americans. Equipped with technology developed by Handgun Control, Inc., these satellites have the ability to detect firearms from hundreds of kilometers up. That's right, neighbors .. the next time you're out in the backyard exercising your Second Amendment rights, the liberals will see it! These satellites are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a Colt .45 and a .38 Special! And when they detect you with a firearm, their computers cross-reference the address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at Berkeley is updated with information about you.

Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!) That's where the "moon" comes in. Powered by nuclear reactors, the "moon" is nothing more than an enormous balloon, emitting trillions of candlepower of gun-revealing light. Piloted by key members of the liberal community, the "moon" is strategically moved across the country, pointing out those who dare to make use of their God-given rights at night!

Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950. That is when it was initially launched. When President Josef Kennedy, at the State of the Union address, proclaimed "We choose to go to the moon", he may as well have said "We choose to go to the weather balloon." The subsequent faking of a "moon" landing on national TV was the first step in a long history of the erosion of our constitutional rights by leftists in this country. No longer can we hide from our government when the sun goes down.

But how

[dmccarty]

Amazing! How did they make them in that warehouse?

Just as the Apollo missions' astronauts?

[Ctrl-Z]

"This link lets you experience the moon just as the Apollo missions' astronauts did..."

I didn't realize that accessing the moon was such a slow process. Kudos to the Apollo astronauts for putting up with the /. effect so effortlessly.

Here is the google cache version....

[Anonymous Coward]

MOooooooooON

Re:Here is the google cache version....

[Justin205]

Oh, come on... You're not karma whoring right.

You need to make it funny AND informative, like this:

MOooooooooON

Moon was delayed

[jmichaelg]

When I was in high school, Neil Armstrong took the first steps on the moon. In my youthful ignorance, I thought the delay between Houston asking him a question and his response was due to the moon being so far away. Now 35 years later, as I experience the delays again, I realize it's just that the link to the moon had been slashdotted.

Re:Damn you Quicktime! Damn yoooooouuuu!

[Trogre]

Oh, quicktime VR.

Never mind

(crawls back under rock)

Re:Stars?

[BlacKat]

Here is a link that explains this phenomenon, which is often used to try and claim the moon landings were faked:

http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae3 23 .cfm

Essentially, you can see some stars when on the moon when facing away from the Sun and/or Earth. However, since the Earth reflects so much sunlight the stars do not have enough exposure on the film to become visible and are only faintly visible with the naked eye. :)

Shutter Speed.

[Boinger69]

In a nutshell, the amount of light coming from the sun/earth/moon overwhelms the stars, to expose the film long enough to capture stars would cause everything else to be way overexposed.

Re:But, we never went to the moon

[WolfWithoutAClause]

* How did the astronauts get thru the Van Allen radiation belt without being toasted? With the amount of radiation present in the belt, it matters not at what speed you're traveling.

The Van Allen belts are actually mostly located over the equator- or atleast that's where they are strongest. By carefully choosing their trajectory, NASA were able to avoid the worst of the belts. However the astronauts still got about 1% of the dose necessary to get radiation poisoning.

* One movie shows the astronauts blasting off from the moon on their way home and the camera, which was on the moon, tilted up to follow the space craft. Who was left behind so they could tilt the camera up to follow the space craft?

It's an automated camera. Amazing what technology they had in those days! Lucky that, otherwise they would have had to leave a cameraman behind to die :-)

* The engine that was used to slow the Lunar Module down, so it didn't crash into the moon surface, puts out thousands of pounds of thrust. Where is the crater under this engine on the moon's surface? The surface dust wasn't even disturbed.

Look, gravity is only 1/6 of that on the earth. A helicopter flies by throwing its own weight in air downwards every second, which is similar to what the lander does; but the helicopter applies about 6x *more* force on the ground than the Lunar Module does with its landing rocket. Why doesn't the ground blow away when a helicopter lands?

* Supposedly, the temperature on the moon's surface is -200 degrees in the shade and over 200 degrees in the light. This means, since there is no atmosphere, there is nothing to hold the heat onto the surface.

Wrong! The surface itself holds the heat. And don't forget- it's in a vacuum, so it loses heat more slowly... just like a thermosflask.

So, when I am facing the light (sun), the front of my suit would be over 200 degrees and the back of my suit (shade) would be -200 degrees. My front would be toast and my back would be ice, instantly, since there is no atmosphere.

No, the heat of the sun is much the same on the moon since the moon is very nearly the same distance from the sun as the earth is. Actually you get reflection of the sun off the ground around you on the moon too, so it isn't so clearcut. The suits actually had airconditioning system in the backpack to keep the astronauts cool (it boiled water to the vacuum to take their heat away, and that of the sun- again because it's hard to cool down in a vacuum.)

* The surface of the moon is covered with dust. This dust was easily "kicked up", as shown by the astronauts. Why isn't there any dust settled on the space craft after the landing?

Actually that's pretty cool. If you look at the dust kicked up it goes in a tiny parabola away from the boot and then lands. It looks very different from what happens on earth due to the lack of air to hold it up. Any dust kicked up from the space craft would fly in a parabola and land directly away from the spacecraft. There's no easy way for it to come back towards the spacecraft, unless it bounced off a rock or something.

Re:Stars?

[uberdave]

Exposure. You can't have really bright objects and really dim objects show up on the same photo.
...Unless you're taking a photo of Bush shaking hands with Stephen Hawking :-)

Blame Canada!

[Morris Schneiderman]

"it took NASA only 7 years" because they hired many of the engineers and middle managers that had been fired by Avrow in Toronto when the new Canadian government cancelled production of the Avrow Arrow jet fighter.

Those guys had considerable experience pushing aerospace technology. In 1949 (yes, you read that correctly) they completed construction and successfully flew a 40 passenger jet airplane with a range of 1400 miles and an air speed of 427 mph.

The Avro Arrow jet fighter first flew in July, 1952 (yes, you read that right, too). It was a fully armoured, mach 2.0 fighter jet.

Other projects COMPLETED by their engineering department included:

1955 Small subsonic jet transport (business jet) 1955 VTOL fighter project 1956 Long range jet transport 1957 P-13 anti-missile missile 1958 Monorail 1958 Supersonic cheap interceptor missile 1958 Ballistic drag re-entry vehicle 1958 Space threshold vehicle 1959 Supersonic trans-atlantic transport studies

Now you know why "it took NASA only 7 years" - and why they could not do it again today.

Re:Blame Canada!

[isaacwith2as]

It also had the first fly-by-wire system, and the next plane to have similar performance was a Soviet interceptor from the 80's. Way ahead of it's time.

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...