Categories: Moon

Gigapan the Apollo Landing Sites

Gigapan from Apollo 17. Credit: Gigapan

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If you haven’t had enough Apollo yet, this is like a firehose of image goodness. Gigapan and NASA Ames have collaborated to make huge, zoomable, panable images from two of the Apollo missions to the Moon. Apollo 16 and 17 are the only missions where the astronauts took panoramic images, so these are the only landing sites available in Gigapan. And if you really want to blow your socks off, look at these images in Google Moon. Click your icon for Google Earth (you DO have it downloaded already, don’t you?? If not go to Google Earth and download it,) choose Moon under the little Saturn-like icon on top, zoom in and find the flags for the Apollo 16 and 17 landing sites. Then look for the “camera” icons and click on one, and then choose the option to “fly” into the images. I’m still gasping from doing this with Apollo 17! Once you recover from flying in, you can then pan around and feel like you are walking alongside Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt on the Moon. It really is amazing!

Here’s the Gigapan image site. Enjoy!

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy has been with Universe Today since 2004, and has published over 6,000 articles on space exploration, astronomy, science and technology. She is the author of two books: "Eight Years to the Moon: the History of the Apollo Missions," (2019) which shares the stories of 60 engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make landing on the Moon possible; and "Incredible Stories from Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos" (2016) tells the stories of those who work on NASA's robotic missions to explore the Solar System and beyond. Follow Nancy on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Nancy_A and and Instagram at and https://www.instagram.com/nancyatkinson_ut/