NASA´s Virtual Tour Of The FAR SIDE Of The Moon (yeehar)

If you would like to fly along please see my signature.

During all the hassle with the Space Craft from GFL I too became obsessed with errors in cloud data and have indeed posted to that effect. In any case something good did come out of all this: I found NASA World Wind thanks to member alphabetaone pointing it out to me.

Ofcourse I started fiddling with it right away because it is so much better than google earth with regards to accuracy. It is a beautiful piece of software with all sorts of goodies plugged in like Geofysical data for elevation, weather, temperature, etc. Most importantly: it is as accurate as can be.

Then I found that they even had the Moon mapped in there with satellite data, elevation and lighting features.

So, I, who always wanted to flip the moon over to see what is on the DARK SIDE (the one side that is not reflecting sunlight because of the relative position of the Moon towards the Earth and Sun) was thinking "Hmmm..."

IF there is something there as legend has it (Ancient base or new structures made by covert projects from Earth) it is quite sure that those parts are censored as missing data, i.e. the famous "Black Patches". Simple missing satellite data as so well explained by knowledgable members on this forum.

What if they missed something?

Let´s fly & find out.

If you choose to fly along, here are my config instructions (Broadband only)
===================================================================
Use a fair chunk of cache, I recommend default + 50% i.e. 15Gigabytes, hopefully you have it. If not, default is fine.

After installation you will see Earth. Goto File->Moon to see the moon.
Settings:
Activate Moon (File->Moon)
Enable Sun Shading
Activate compass

Double click left = Zoom in or Move To depending on tilt level
Double click right = Zoom out
Click & Hold left & Move = Pan
Click & Hold right & Move = Tilt

This is your view when selecting moon with the parameters above.

Between every move you need to let the program load the information from the NASA servers, so please be patient.
I apologise for the low quality of the screenshots, I had to find a quality/size ration suitable for upload.

So here we start at a nice altitude some 4000 km. Tools->Compass to switch on the compass.


View->Sun Shading to see the sun position and lighting. Click and we´re dark on this side.


With the left mouse button spin the moon left till you see Mare Nectaris and Mare Fecunditatis


Double click to zoom in.


Position yourself in the middle of Mare Nectaris and Mare Fecunditatis and double click to descend. The Magelhaens crater becomes visible.


Center on Magelhaens with left mouse button and drag, and zoom until it fills the screen


It´s a bit dark here View->Sun shading or Shift-S to disable shading. Better.


Now drag the crater just adjacent to the middle of the screen. Hmm. Some static here.


Use right button and drag to tilt between 70-75º. Goclenius crater becomes visible. Let elevation load, be patient.


Use right button and side drag to swing around to a heading of 156º, keep tilt as steady as possible. Colombo crater becomes visible.


Continued...

Adjusted title.

[edit on 16-10-2008 by MoonMine]

Pull the moon to approach Colombo. Watch compass, watch tilt. Ignore the purple glitches I guess.


When at Colombu press the Spacebar to reset tilt and heading, and zoom out to 50km using right mouse button double click.


Zoom out to about 450km to get an overview of all the craters in the area.


Zoom out even further until you see on your top left the Sinus Asperitatis plane (in green) and Rimae Hypatia (in red.)


Center on Sinus Asperitatis and zoom in on the perfect circle. Moltke becomes visible in a NW direction.


Center the shape and zoom to about 50 km. Interesting crater.


Let´s see if it has elevation data. Tilt 70 to 75º right mouse and pull. Keep your heading close to 0º (North) Hm. No real elevation to speak of. It looks like Moltke on our NW wants us to have a look.


Go there by pulling the surface towards you with left mouse. What´s with the glow? Eerie.


Really eerie.


From here position yourself like this and tilt to about 80º. Our altitude is around 20km, horizon around 90km. We are going to pay Rimae Ritter a visit and find Dionysis.


Pull the surface until you get there.


From here pull right until you can see this: Silberschlag and Rimae Ariadaeus center and Ariadaeus on your left.


Tilt to 70º and follow the river bed.


Here we are at Silberschlag and another blue "glitch".


A bit odd.


From here travel to the missing patch of data right on the fork in the river bed. Hyginus becomes visible.


And yes, it does fork.


Follow the left fork to Hyginus. The bed becomes whiter.


At Hyginus turn NE and follow the trail into Mare Vaporum


Find some interesting shapes. Unable to get clearer unfortunatly.


Swing around to 180º (South). Altitude 40km. Tilt 70-75º. Rimae Triesnecker looms on the horizon. Fly there.


From Triesnecker find Rhaeticus and fly there. From there Find Hipparchus and fly there.


From Hipparchus fly into Halley crater (Straight ahead) Play around with right mouse for some excellent elevation views.



Continued...

Find Hind at 43º and go there.


There seem to be some glitches in the crater behind Hind.


Yup. Press the space bar to reset tilt and direction.


Descend a little.


And play ouround with right mouse button.


That is not a "2".


From here hit the spacebar and zoom out to about 285km (double click right mouse button)


Position yourself due South, tilt 70º, altitude 350km and let´s find Playfair straight ahead. Go there.


From here you should see Faraday. Fly.


At Faraday press space and center to see Faraday Glitch City.


Climb to 350km and resume a heading of 180º. We are going to cross the hills to find the Southpole. Tilt 70º.


Keep pulling until you reach the hills. There is some missing data.


Center on the arrow shaped missing data and double click left to descend to 50km. Curtius crater is visible straight ahead. Let it load!! Look at the little Nasa icon on the bottom right part of your screen. When it´s gone it´s done loading.


Fly around a bit in Curtius crater and enjoy the view.


From the center of Curtius position yourself once again due South at 180º at an altitude of 90km with 70º tilt.


Pull until you reach the pole and let it load.


Hit space to see the Moon´s ehhh. Propulsion system. I always wondered what kept it in orbit...


From here climb to 2000km. Drygalski appears on the left side of the pole. Position, center and fly there.


Center. Descend to 200km. Change heading to -35º. The ancient one of Drygalski bids you good night.


Press Shift-S to switch of the light. Goodnight.


This concludes the tour. I hope it was as fun for you as it was for me making it...

I would love to hear of your own travels and discoveries.

As for me, I´ve just started...

Happy flying.

MoonMine

[pedantic]
There is no dark side of the moon. The entire surface of the moon gets exposed to sunlight since it does make one rotation per month (approx.).

The correct terminology would be far side
[/pedantic]

Thanks for the tip.

[edit on 16-10-2008 by Phage]

Originally posted by Phage

There is no dark side of the moon. The entire surface of the moon gets exposed to sunlight since it does make one rotation per month (approx.).

Tell that to Pink Floyd.

Kidding aside, thanks for the correction I´ll see if I can adjust the title now.

PS: There seems to be a beta version out for MAC OS...

MoonMine

Great thread. Impressive. Of course I've always been a little interested in the blue anomaly, and the others are a very nice addition as well.

Now I'm going to see if I can get this to work with "wine" on linux. Otherwise I may be forced to boot into xp.

reply to post by MoonMine


If you can provide a linkie to that I would greatly appreciate it.
I couldn't find it, unless you're talking about something called: World Wind Java SDK

Yes he is, and its at the bottom with his signature.

Hey, you can see all the hallways and the layout of all those interesting structures. Alot like the floorplans my mother was always drawing, she had a passion for architecture and drew up lovely little solar greenhouse home designs.
Can't really miss them, can you?

Amazing thread!!! I think this is the most detailed thread about anomilies that I have seen on ATS. Great Job. Star and Flag to you. I hope everyone takes a look at this

Originally posted by schrodingers dog
reply to post by MoonMine

 

If you can provide a linkie to that I would greatly appreciate it.
I couldn't find it, unless you're talking about something called: World Wind Java SDK

Arg. You´re right. In my mind osx stuck but it was Java. Darned....

In any case I would assume it does run on mac os using the standard Windows shell (forgot the name).

Lastly the source code is available, but I´m not sure if you´re up for a port to Mac OS. Maybe a guru on the board?

This sucks, sorry schrodingers dog...

MoonMine

I'm going to have to mail this link to a few people. This is the best thread I've seen for a while. Thank you again for this jewel. And the wonders on the moon never cease to amaze!

Originally posted by mystiq
I'm going to have to mail this link to a few people. This is the best thread I've seen for a while. Thank you again for this jewel. And the wonders on the moon never cease to amaze!

Thanks a lot, I appreciate that.

You know I was reluctant to post because I was too busy playing with it, and then decided I had to so others could play with it too.

Much better this way...

When in the dark as I am right now (03:28am) with just my flatscreen on and some appropriate music... Man, it almost feels like I´m out there.....

Love it.

MoonMine

Great thread Moon Mine, very interesting, star and Flag for you.

The tour is greatly appreciated, I've played with this before, but mostly end up fumbling around in the dark so to speak.

These applications that we have, Google Earth, World Wind etc still amaze me. I'd never have thought I'd have had satellite imagery of the world on my home PC, especially for free!

Once again, good job.

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[edit on 17/10/08 by Jbird]

reply to post by MoonMine


Thank you, Moon! What a great post.

reply to post by MoonMine


Right on man! What a kick as thread...

I believe that earns a Singh Award( adds one "Singh Award" to inventory)

I saved this to my fav's. Keep it up!!!

I got it to work in XP and just want the add ons now. But it doesn't quite work in linux with wine. Nor should it actually be wine program as its released under the open source license so it should be able to be ported to linux. The forum is here: forum.worldwindcentral.com...
And theres some talk about this issue. The hang up is with the netscape and direct x, though I can't tell which one is causing the crash and can't find how to change it to opengl yet to test it. If its ported soon, and it should be, then it will be available in synaptic.

Anyway this is a wonderful program. I'm really amazed with it.

Does anyone know the moon landing co-ordinates so that we can see if the stars and stripes are still there (if they were there in the first place!!!)

Damn! Its times like these and only time like these that I wish I had a PC!

Anyway I can dictate all the different places I want you to go and have you post images on ATS for me?