google moon

In honor of the 36th anniversary of the landing of Apollo 11 on the moon, Google has created Google Moon, an extension of the Google Maps interface to allow exploration of the surface of the moon. Unfortunately, it includes only the region in which the manned Apollo missions landed, rather than the entire visible hemisphere of the moon; apparently, NASA only gave them high-resolution images of that region, so they couldn’t provide anything beyond that. (Though according to Larry Schwimmer, the engineer for Google who is behind the moon project, we might just get to see more coverage sometime!) And while the resolution is certainly not good enough to see the flag we left behind at Tranquility Base or Edwin Aldrin’s famous bootprint in the dust, Google engineers appear to have tweaked the detail sufficiently to show what the moon is really made of!