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Chuck wrote:
"Perhaps from an Apollo  spacecraft?"

And Lu wrote:
"That was going to be my guess also.   Since the eyes of the
man-in-the-moon are in the center rather than on the  edge, we must be
seeing a mosaic from an Apollo spacecraft.  Apollo  8?"

Yes! The photograph shows a large portion of the Moon that is never  visible
from Earth. The photographer was directly above a point just south of  Mare
Crisium --the "eye" that we normally see from Earth as a small oval very  close
to the Moon's limb. Any of the Apollo spacecraft that travelled to lunar
distances (Apollos 8 and 10-17) would have seen something similar as they
departed the Moon, but the most likely image is AS11-44-6667 taken from Apollo  11 on
July 22, 1969 around 0700 GMT. The Weather Channel's graphic can be  obtained
from that photograph almost perfectly by shrinking it down and rotating  90
degrees. If you google the image ID, you can find over two dozen versions of
it on the web. There is also a small possibility that an image from Apollo 16
was used instead, but it's not as good a match. [btw, it's not a mosaic. it's
an  actual single photograph taken with a Hasselblad camera with a 70mm  lense]

I think it's a little amazing that an image of the Moon showing it  in an
orientation that's absolutely impossible to see from the surface of the  Earth
has become the Weather Channel's iconic image of the Full Moon. We  Earthlings
have seen the same mottled features on the face of the Moon since the
beginning of history, but somehow, someone grabbed a view from space that can  never
be seen from here on terra firma.

I mentioned we can get a line of  position from the image. The exact center
of the Moon's visible disk, taken from  the original image, is located just
south of Mare Crisium at 6 North, 59 East.  These are the coordinates in the
usual lunar system where the visible center as  seen from Earth (after librations)
is 0, 0. So we can draw a line from the  Moon's center through that point 6N,
59E on the surface and extend it for some  tens of thousands of miles into
space. Naturally it goes nowhere near the Earth.  It points about 60 degrees
away from the Earth in the direction of the trailing  Lagrangian point. The
photographer and his companions --Armstrong, Aldrin, and  Collins-- must have been
situated somewhere along that line of position.   If we had a scale for the
image, we could measure the Moon's semidiameter and  turn it into a distance
along that line, fixing the position in space. In the  absence of scale
information, we have a statement from one NASA image caption  that the spacecraft was
10,000 nautical miles from the Moon at this time. That's  consistent with the
image and the approximate time, but it sounds like a rough  estimate to me.
Another caption gives the distance as 18,000 kilometers, which  sounds more
precise, but it's just a metric conversion from 10,000  n.m.

-FER
42.0N 87.7W, or 41.4N  72.1W.
www.HistoricalAtlas.com/lunars

   

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