Always interesting to see parts of a probe set against the celestial body it is observing. Unlike images that only include the target, these remind you of the presence of a probe or observer. It illustrates a clear difference between seeing these bodies from a great distance (say from a telescope like Hubble) versus knowing that these views were taken very far away from us here on Earth and in the proximity of a very alien world.

The mission Kaguya is Japan’s contribution to the International Lunar Decade which has only just begun and might hopefully end with some form of manned mission by or around 2017.

The mission has thus far released one of it’s two smaller probes (Rstar) which will independently orbit the moon and the second smaller probe (Vrad) will be set in orbit sometime today. The mission’s main objective is to help solve some of the mysteries of the moon’s origin as well as acquire a more complete understanding as to the moon’s usefulness to the human race and it’s potential role in future space exploration.

Look at the date on this mission. It’s 1966… 3 years before the Apollo 11 manned landing on the moon. It shows you what we as a species could really do had we the initiative to do it. Just 3 years after landing the first unmanned probe on the surface of the moon… we were ready to send people. That would almost be like sending men to Mars just a few years after Viking landed in 1976. Okay… it is much further away than the moon and many other technical difficulties as well. So lets say that it would been like sending people to Mars 10 years after Viking. That would be 1986 and here we are 20 years after that saying it will still take another 15.

The Surveyor craft was sent to the surface of the moon largely just to prove that we could do it. It was doing what its name suggested… surveying places for Apollo to plant a few flags.

The Ron Howard documentary “In the Shadow of the Moon”, came to theaters on September 7th. How did I miss this? See the trailer here.

The very first time we humans ever had a look at the surface of another world was in 1966 with the Luna 9 spacecraft. The event is nearly wiped from our collective memory after the successes of Apollo, but at the time this was another feather in the cap of the Soviet Space Program. Now they were able to claim the first successful touchdown as well as first man in space, first spacewalk, first object in space… you name it.

The Lunokhod 2 rover lasted much longer and traveled much further than Lunokhod 1 did. It covered a distance of 37 km and operated for 4 months.

More than a year after Americans set foot on the moon in 1969, the Soviets landed the worlds first remote “rover” type vehicle ever to explore the surface of another world. One almost has to wonder how the politics of this mission even played out to bother even letting it continue. It would hardly seem worthwhile sending a robot to do the work actual humans would be conducting 5 more additional times beyond the historic Apollo 11 landing from the year previous.

The rover was named “Lunokhod” and translated means, “Moon Walker”, it carried out a mission for 11 days and traveled 10.5 km. Despite the fact that nobody knows exactly where the rover rests today, the rover and lander were sold at auction in 1993 for $68,500. The auction catalog read that it was, “resting on the surface of the moon”.

The Soviet spacecraft Luna 3 was the third such craft to be successfully sent to the moon in history. The images were not very great, as can be seen… but it was the first glimpse mankind ever had of the side of the moon that is permanently facing away from us. With the first look at the “dark side of the moon” many people were quite excited and the images were published the world over. It took a total of 29 pictures and was able to image at least 70% of that unseen side of the moon.

The image is largely intact but for the purposes of presentation I faked the “8” in the number on the bottom and actually added some noise lines.

Earthrise as seen from Apollo 11 as it approached its historic landing.

Managed to make the more common wallpaper size 1024×768 for the 14 most recent wallpaper posts (started with set 05 images, 1-4 to come). Download zip file here. Some were not produced as they just didn’t translate so easily into the format. However, the opposite is true in some cases such as for this image of the Martian south pole. Its resolution was hopelessly low for the larger landscape format, so now with the smaller size it was possible (just barely) to get it posted as a wallpaper.

Included in the set for download are the images pictured at the top and for the sake of google search, here they are listed out:

• 1024×768 Wallpaper of CALLISTO at half view, moon of JUPITER
• 1024×768 Wallpaper of EARTH from APOLLO landing site
• 1024×768 Wallpaper portrait of EUROPA, moon of JUPITER
• 1024×768 Wallpaper portrait of JUPITER
• 1024×768 Wallpaper of MARS region of DEUTERONILUS (not shown)
• 1024×768 Wallpaper of MARS surface at HUSBAND HILL
• 1024×768 Wallpaper portrait of MARS
• 1024×768 Wallpaper portrait of PHOEBE, moon of SATURN
• 1024×768 Wallpaper portrait of RHEA, moon of SATURN
• 1024×768 Wallpaper of SATURN, crescent view (not shown)
• 1024×768 Wallpaper of SATURN from above the NORTHERN POLE
• 1024×768 Wallpaper of SATURN globe
• 1024×768 Wallpaper of SPACE WALK
• 1024×768 Wallpaper portrait of TETHYS, moon of SATURN

I stumbled across an image of Mars and our moon a while back, either on Universe Today or just from looking for great images of Mars on google. Anyway, it never occured to me that you can get such great detail of Mars while still being able to see a limb of the Moon in the same view. I thought it was a Photoshop job until I looked up “occult+Saturn+moon” and found similar images. For some reason, Jupiter images are more a rarity. What is unmistakable is that the above Moon/Mars image by Ron Dantowitz is pretty incredible for its clarity and detail.

I couldn’t find any of the moon and a tiny blue dot of Uranus, but you can always use your imagination.

U. Gordan just sent me one of Venus too

NASA has put out a “Return to the Moon” trailer at anon.nasa-global.edgesuite.net

Trying to get some decent Apollo images on here from time to time. So many of these images are so often seen that I want to focus on the ones that really are great but are rarely seen.

Seeing the size of Earth as it really appears from the surface of the moon reminds me of this wallpaper that I grew up with in my room as a child. I always assumed it was an actual image, but in reality the Earth appears about 1/20 the size and Earth would never phase in shadow from north to south under any circumstance! (I missed that obvious flaw as pointed out by Paul Neave). I beleive they still sell this wallpaper as I still see it around occasionally at stores and other public spaces (no pun). In addition to this image, you also see the Earth from moon shots taken while in- moon-orbit which also gives the Earth a far larger appearance… but I suspect that some good zoom lenses were likely utilized to get those looks as well.

A few decades ago, about 12 men walked upon the surface of another celestial body for the first time in history. At one point, Neil Armstrong looked up at Earth and blotted it out with his thumb and thought the significance of that simple act. “That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam”. While these were not Armstrong’s words, but instead Carl Sagan’s, it is clear that it is along these similar lines he was thinking.

It is easy to forget how incredible those moments were as they happened so long ago, and the first of these was some months before I even existed as a person. We have grown accustomed to these images of men walking on the moon, in no small part because a follow up is so long overdue that they seem antiquated or quaint. So it seemed to me that out of 50 wallpapers uploaded it might be appropriate to include man’s first exploration of any of these places as part of the collection.

Galileo, on its way to the Jupiter system, looked back at the moon (Luna) and returned this image which largely shows the side of the moon we never see from Earth. The far side of the moon was first photographed by the Soviets in 1959 with the Zond-3 spacecraft.