Panoramas From Space!

I’ve been posting panorama pictures that I’ve taken, the newer ones from my iPhone 6+ which has a built-in feature to take them, the older ones generated by software from dozens of individual frames taken by a DSLR.

But before that, there was film…

When the Apollo astronauts got out on the lunar surface during our six landings there, one of the first things they did was to take a survey panorama, using their 70mm Hasselblad cameras. They did it just like I do (maybe that’s where I learned it, back in my lost youth), overlapping frames as you turn.

A group at the Lunar & Planetary Institute has put together those panoramas and they’re yours to peruse, along with all of the original 70mm frames.

Photo from Lunar & Planetary Institute, NASA, and Universities Space Research Association

Apollo 17 took fourteen panoramas. This is the “preview” file, i.e., the small, low-resolution version. If you want to see any of the full-sized, high definition files, visit the site.

Then there was the release today of a new panorama from the Hubble Space Telescope, the image of the Andromeda Galaxy being the largest panorama ever made from Hubble images. Over 100,000,000 stars can be seen, so go get your big monitor, load up the huge & zoomable image (if you can get through, their server seems to be a bit overloaded at the moment), put some Pink Floyd on, and go visit Andromeda for an hour or two!