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Apollo 11 - The First Man on Moon

On July 20, 1969, the first man walked on the moon. Thirty-five years later Hans Nyberg, of panoramas.dk, stitched together a panorama from new digitized scans of the original film taken by astronaut Neil Armstrong to create a QTVR 360-degree panorama of the event, including the live audio of Armstrong as he takes his monumental first step.

The crew - comprised of commander Armstrong, Edwin E. Aldrin Jr. (Buzz Aldrin) and pilot Michael Collins - launched the mission from the Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39A on July 16, 1969, landing on the moon four days later in the Sea of Tranquility (Mare Tranquillitatis). In Nyberg’s panorama you can see Buzz Aldrin and the landing module unloading material for the experiments.

The camera used for this panorama was a special version of the Hasselblad 500. Hans Nyberg notes “it had a grid right in front of the film, which gives you the crosshairs you see in the panorama. The images where made handheld and they are definitely not made with the lens at the nodal point, which makes them very difficult to stitch. However I find it is interesting that they even thought of making images for 360-degree panoramas.” The method of stitching single images together for 360-degree panoramas had not been developed in 1969. “The Hasselblad that they used was a modified 500EL with no viewer and a special handle; as far as I understand it was mounted on the front of the suit. The lens is a 60 mm with around 50-degree fov.”

(Read more about the APOLLO-11 HASSELBLAD CAMERAS and the Apollo 14 Camera Equipment.)

There is only one set of 16 images taken around and with very different overlapping for the panorama, which are not perfectly horizontal and most of them point about 7 degrees down.

Images are credit NASA - photos by Neil Armstrong.
The Apollo 11 panorama was stitched and converted to QTVR by Hans Nyberg

Apollo 17 - The Last Mission

The Saturn V carrying Apollo 17 was launched from NASA John F. Kennedy Space Center on December 7, 1972. Apollo 17 was the sixth and last Apollo mission in which humans walked on the lunar surface. On December 11, 1972, Commander Eugene A Cernan and LM pilot Harrison Schmitt, the first scientist on the moon, landed in the Lunar Module while the Command and Service Module (CSM) with pilot Ronald E. Evans continued in lunar orbit. The mission lasted 12 days and spent 75 hours on the moon’s surface.

The Apollo 17 has a slight yellow brown cast, which Nyberg tried to keep, admittedly not knowing whether this is correct. Also, some of the images for the Apollo 17 were taken with the camera moved at least two to three feet, making it impossible to use automatic blending and requiring Nyberg to hand stitch them in Photoshop.

Images are credit NASA - photos by Gene Cernan.
The Apollo 17 panorama was stitched and converted to QTVR by Hans Nyberg .
The images for this panorama are new scans from the original film taken by Cernan in 1972 and Kipp Teague scanned them for the Apollo Image Gallery.

Saturn V Rocket

Bob Blankenship produced a panorama of the Saturn V rocket, like the one that Neil Armstrong took to the moon. He has included the audio describing the descent and landing on the moon’s surface and Armstrong’s comments as he stepped onto the moon’s surface, along with two of President Kennedy’s speeches asking the American public to accept the challenge of landing a man on the moon before the end of the decade.

Did you know?

(1) The moon is spiraling away from Earth at a rate of 3.8 cm (1.5 inches) per year. Why? Earth's ocean tides are responsible.
(2) The moon probably has a liquid core.
(3) The universal force of gravity is very stable. Newton's gravitational constant G has changed less than 1 part in 100-billion since the laser experiments began (the "lunar laser ranging retroreflector array" that Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin put there on July 21, 1969, about an hour before the end of their final moonwalk. Thirty-five years later, it's the only Apollo science experiment still running).

For more information on the lunar laser ranging retroreflector array, read ‘Apollo 11 Science Experiment Still Running'.

The Apollo Lunar Surface Journal and its editor, Erik Jones, are preparing for a release of a DVD-ROM edition of the Journal for March 2005, and will include both of Hans Nyberg’s panoramas.

Apollo Lunar Surface Journal
The Apollo Lunar Surface Journal is a record of the lunar surface operations conducted by the six pairs of astronauts who landed on the Moon from 1969 through 1972. The Journal is intended as a resource for anyone wanting to know what happened during the missions and why. It includes a corrected transcript of all recorded conversations between the lunar surface crews and Houston. The Journal also contains extensive, interwoven commentary by the Editor and by ten of the twelve moon walking astronauts.

High quality scans of NASA images related to the landing missions are available in Kipp Teague's Apollo Image Gallery.

For any conspiracy theorists out there, read astronomer Philip Plait’s ‘Fox TV and the Apollo Moon Hoax’.