Take a Five-minute Animated Tour of the Moon
Abe Michelen | April 10, 2018It is now possible to take a tour of the moon from the comfort of home. In 2011, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) created the original tour of the moon, a video animation of a virtual tour showing all the beauty of Earth's closest neighbor.
For the last six years, the LRO continued taking pictures and videos using the same camera. Last week, NASA released a stunning 4k resolution of a recreated tour using the enormous amount of data collected during the intervening years.
The tour shows the most important sites of the moon, including the precise landing sites of the Apollo 17 and Lunar Rover near the equator in the Taurus-Littrow Valley, the Aitken-South Pole basin, the Tycho Crater, the Aristarchus Plateau and other features. Some of the sites have been imaged at resolutions as high as 25 cm per pixel.