36 years. Happy anniversary to all Apollophiles everywhere.

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"I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day." - Douglas Adams

Ditto,

Pity they could not find some way to include Viking (29th Aniversary) as well.

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We all know those Venusians: Doing their hair in shock waves, smoking electrical coronas, wearing Van Allen belts and resting their tiny elbows on a Geiger counter...

John Sladek, The New Apocrypha, pg 34.

Don't miss to fully zoom into some places at http://moon.google.com :-)

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"Flying in space is risky business, but just staying on this planet is risky business too." - John Young, astronaut

It is surprising how clustered the Apollo missions were

Why was this?

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Fame, glory adventure, a cyber warrior craves not these things.

- You couldn't land very much north or south of the equator as this would have meant the CSM/LM had to go into a high inclination orbit which was fuel intensive.
- You couldn't land very much in the east as the orbit brought the landing LM around the eastern edge of the moon. It was necessary for the ground to have enough tracking and checkout time with the LM before it begins the powered descent. A similar contraint existed for a western site. After lunar liftoff, the LM shouldn't vanish too quickly behind the western limb of the moon.

Harald

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"Flying in space is risky business, but just staying on this planet is risky business too." - John Young, astronaut

What do you mean 29th aniversary? According to the Vinland map the Vikings go to the moon 1000 years before Armstrong

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Its better tae meddle wi the deil............

I zoomed in all the way. Maybe it's me or just the facts that the imagery they had was really old, but I found the whole thing to be a little cheesey.

What kucharek said is true. Also, Google's map of the Moon is a Mercator projection of the entire Moon, including the backside. So half of the map is off-limits to start with, and the northern and southern edges are exaggerated in size to keep the proportions consistent (the same way that Greenland looks bigger than South America on Earth), so the landing site look a lot more clustered than they actually were. This view is much more reasonable.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

A map of the entire moon would not be Mercator, because that would go to infinity. I tried to find the details on the map projection, but didn't find anything obvious. When I emailed them, using the address from this page in the link "I have questions and/or comments about Google Moon. Well, we want to hear them." But the emails bounced, no such addressee. At first, I thought it was the spam filter, but my X-Spam-Report scores seem OK.

OTOH, there are jobs on the moon!

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http://cleardarksky.com/c/DrhmNCcs0.gif

I laughed out loud when I zoomed in on Apollo 11 =D>

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Yo Adrian. The Phillies won the Series.

Actually, if you zoom all the way out and look closely, they've (for unknown reasons) repeated the Moon-map three times. This has the result of making the Apollo missions appear three times more clustered (east-west only) than in reality.

Works for all of the missions. A pretty cheesy effect if you ask me...

If you scroll, without zooming out, the Apollo missions will appear in each third. I guess they couldn't have mare than one cluster on the screen at one time, since they can be queried.

Interesting, that there is a distinct band across the middle third of the image.

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http://cleardarksky.com/c/DrhmNCcs0.gif

Was that a pun or a misspelling?

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Yo Adrian. The Phillies won the Series.

typo HTG

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http://cleardarksky.com/c/DrhmNCcs0.gif

Where'd they get the image? Could it be a relief issue? (ie, more shadowing at higher latitudes)

And this one which shows other lunar missions as well:
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary...anding_map.jpg

Out of curiosity, where was 13 supposed to land?

Fra Mauro - where Apollo 14 *did* land. In other words, A14 performed the mission A13 was supposed to.

Fra Mauro where 14 landed.

very good

8)