Pretty Picture: Eagle's Landing

Here is an amateur's take on Buzz Aldrin's 360-degree panoramic series of photographs, taken while Neil Armstrong was working in the shadow of the lander. Armstrong was remembered today in a memorial service held at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.

Clicking on the image will take you to a web page about the image; clicking on the image there will take you to a 19000-pixel-wide version that amounts to 25 MB.

There is a little more artifice in this panorama than is typical for images on this site. Processor Tom Dahl explains:

Scans of the original images which were used as the basis of this assembled panorama can be found on Kipp Teague's Project Apollo Image Gallery web site. The individual images were manually composited and blended in Photoshop CS3, and the reseau "cross-hair" marks and sky anomalies were painted out in order to yield a more naturally appearing scene.

Most of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module "Eagle" (including the complete ascent stage) was not included in the original Apollo 11 frames. In order to complete the scene aesthetically an image of the Apollo 17 Lunar Module "Challenger" was used to provide the missing portions (with manual changes to approximate the unique appearance of the Apollo 11 LM).

The original images from which this panorama was assembled are NASA frames AS11-40-5881 to AS11-40-5891, and AS17-140-21370, provided by Kipp Teague.

I watched the first part of Armstrong's memorial service before school this morning. Gene Cernan's speech was heartfelt and moving:

C-SPAN has posted a video of the whole service.