Walk on the Moon with Neil Armstrong in a Beautiful Interactive Panorama

Danish photographer Hans Nyberg has created several interactive panoramas, including a new one featuring the Curiosity rover. But today, we’d like to focus on one he created for Apollo 11, allowing you walk along with Neil Armstrong’s steps on the Moon. “Armstrong only appears in a few images on the Moon, as he was the one who took almost all images, Nyberg writes on his website. “But his shadow is there and in the helmet reflection in the famous image of Buzz Aldrin you see him.”

It works best to view the panorama in full screen; click the thumbnail images at the top to see the various still images.

This panorama is wonderful, as it lets you zoom in and out, and pan around Tranquility Base. “Many have stitched the panoramas made by the Apollo astronauts also before I made it in 2004,” Nyberg told Universe Today. “But the available files were small and of poor quality.” (here’s the link to the files at the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal).

Nyberg originally made a panoramas for all the Apollo landing sites for the 35th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, but has been working on making better versions, with some updated in 2007. “The new scans made before the anniversary in 2004 made it possible to do panoramas in sizes up to around 18,000 pixels width,” Nyberg said via email. “That was larger than I wanted to publish at that time but today we have viewers which easily can show much larger. The stitchers we have today are also much better than what I used in 2004 and they can easy create the basic stitch which you can correct in Photoshop.”

Nyberg said that with Armstrong’s death, he published the new Apollo 11 panorama first, but soon will have the panoramas of the other Apollo landing sites finished.

Thanks to Hans Nyberg for allowing Universe Today to post the Apollo 11 panorama.