Moon Pictures

To see our full collection of
Moon pictures:

Gene Cernan ascended the ladder to his lunar landing module in December of 1972, the last man to set foot on the surface of the moon. After four short years, NASA had sent seven missions to the moon, six of them successful, and had collected copious pictures of the moon and over 800 pounds of moon rocks. The moon has piqued the romantic notions of humankind for thousands of years. Many deities from ancient societies were associated with the moon: Egyptian goddess Isis, Greek goddess Aphrodite, Hindu god Shiva, and Celtic goddess Morgana. The ancient Greeks were the first to scientifically study the moon, Plutarch asserting that people inhabited the surface. He believed that the dark areas were bodies of water and the light areas were land. This tradition persisted, reflected in the current names for the disparate areas on the moon: mares and terrae from the Latin words for seas and land.

Scientists have long speculated about the origin of the moon, the first being George Howard Darwin, son of Charles Darwin. He proposed that the moon formed from gravitational forces, the earth spinning with such speed and force that a portion separated and became a satellite of its parent, the Pacific Ocean forming as a result. This theory lingered well into the 20th century, even printed in elementary textbooks in the thirties. The current theory asserts that a large object roughly the size of Mars collided with the earth, launching debris into orbit. Thus the moon formed from pieces of the earth and the collision object. The fact that the moon has an uneven distribution of mass, the heavy side facing away from the earth, inhibiting rotation, seems to support this theory.

Humankind’s fascination with the moon, coupled with the paranoia atmosphere of the Cold War years, lead to a frenzied race to develop the technology necessary to land an American on the moon. So in the summer of 1969, an unlikely Neil Armstrong took his first small step into immortality. Included in our collection of moon pictures is the famous shot of Buzz Aldrin, companion of Armstrong on the Apollo 11 landing, loping across surface of the moon, compensating for a gravity one sixth that of earth’s. We also have Cernan saluting the US flag on the Apollo 17 mission. Representing the beginning and end of a fantastic legacy of humans freed for a time from the dusty bonds of earth and stepping on ground only dreamt about by others, these pictures of the moon provided a glimpse of another world. Notice in both pictures, no stars are visible, since there is no atmosphere to defract the light. The flag hangs still where there is no wind to stir it, and the footsteps left by these men will remain imprinted in the soft surface of the moon for as long as it exists. Our selection of moon pictures is a tribute to their fearless attempts to cross the void of space, an effort to make available images of those journeys for your home.


James Webb©2005