Yes... I'm very pleased to report that I have just rediscovered the Lunar Picture of the Day website. It was out of commission for quite a while, but since Jan. 17 it's been back in business.

If you haven't seen it before, it contains a spectacular and/or interesting image with caption every day. The best amateur shots, which are truly amazing these days, and occasional images from lunar missions of the past, or historic images like old maps. Very worthwhile.

Phil

http://www.lpod.org/

Thanks for the heads up, Phil.
I had recently removed LPOD from my bookmarks bar due to inactivity... (It nestled so nicely between APOD and EPOD) Glad to be able to restore it to its rightful place.

Thank you!
It was earlier one of my favorites and now it's back...
If you ever dicide to put it "out of commission for quite a while" you should write it down somewhere on site...
I thought something bad has happened to you...
I'm just glad that you are back

We should go for the ' UnmannedSpacecraft Photo of the Day '

Phil, Congratulations, I have just visited that URL and it is a good Moon Portal and I have alread bookmarked it. It is very worthwhile as you said.

Rodolfo

LPOD has some cleaned up Lunar Orbiter images up:

LPOD unstriped Lunar image and discussion:

http://www.lpod.org/index.php?paged=8

http://www.lpod.org/?p=76#comments


Unstriped LO image of Plato:

http://solarsystem.dlr.de/HofW/nr/060/


And from the horse's mouth:

USGS Astrogeology: Lunar Orbiter Digitisation Project:

http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/Projects/Luna...erDigitization/

Bob Shaw

Bob, your first link is NOT to a cleaned-up LO image.


I just reviewed the Byrne book... it's very good as far as the images go, and it containbs a CD-ROM with more images than appear in print. But the indexing is awful, so trying to find a specific feature is hard unless it happens to be one he mentions in the text.

Byrne worked at Bellcomm in the 60s, helping select Apollo landing sites. In fact he wrote the minutes of the meetings - I spoke to him in Houston a few years ago.

the USGS project is excellent... first they worked on the medium-range images to get near-global coverage, now they are going into the high resolution images of Apollo candidate sites and other science targets. Very good results.

Phil

Phil:

Sorry, Ted! Went a bit mad there!

Try this instead:

http://www.lpod.org/index.php?paged=9

Bob Shaw

I think folks here might be interested in these two recent additions to the LPOD.


NASA World Wind software is now applied from Earth to the Moon:

http://www.lpod.org/?m=20060531


Identifying features on a 2.6-day old Moon:

http://www.lpod.org/?m=20060601

http://www.lpod.org/

Just thought I'd mention that my Stardust image is the LPOD today.

Once again, that's an impressive feat you've pulled with that originally very hazy image, Ted.
Nice work!

I'm a bit "wtf?" with the Nozomi image you did previously Ted...where in hells name did that little data set come from

Doug

More Nozomi stuff to come.....I didn't say anything about that one because I don't like the way it ended up looking. I think this version is better.




Ted

Wow. That's great! I guess we're coming up on 10 years for that picture...

Not to get too far off topic, but how many sets did Nozomi end up taking? I note that it had several Earth/Moon flybys on its tortured path to Mars (September and December 1998, December 2002, and June 2003). It was also part of the armada that sailed to Mars in 2003 but was deemed "not sufficiently clean of bugs" and forced to flyby at a distance of 1000km. It seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle since Mars Express, Spirit, and Opportunity enjoyed such widespread success. Did the Japanese operators work in a flyby sequence?

To answer your first question, there were several Nozomi sequences, but with very few images and heavy onboard jpeging, as Nozomi had very little onboard storage. Yes, they did work in a flyby sequence, but due to problems with the spacecraft, it could not be transmitted.