The moon is the most prominent object in the night sky. The ancients thought maybe it had seas of dark liquid on it so these seas were called "Maria" or latin for seas. As the advent of telescopes in the 17th century occurred, it became more clear these weren't seas of liquid but of some sort of darker rock. With telescopes, it was noted the moon also had millions of craters. It was unknown how these formed as the Earth didn't have an equivalent terrain of "craters the size of city states over a vast continent-sized area" and initially these were thought to be volcanic in origin with the Mare seas being lava that filled many of these calderas. Studies during the space age of the moon and other planets proved craters were the norm and were from cosmic meteorite impacts, and the Earth was the oddball, it having a habit of erasing craters caused by cosmic impacts. Today the moon is past its heyday of popular culture in the 19th to mid 20th century of being explored and having extraterrestrial life, Mars now taking that place.
- The moon from Earth upon the launch of Artemis 1
This contains 64K real color and normal maps of the moon so you can watch Artemis 1 in real time with DaveBowman2001's amazing addon!
DOWNLOAD THE GRAND TOUR MOON BASE TEXTURES HERE!!!File below is several gigabytes so I decided to make it separate!!! It has optional extra layers like topography, geology, etc.
GRAND TOUR MOON EXTRAS!!!
- Tycho Crater and its central peak up close in 64K detail
One thing that surprised me was how much color the moon actually has. So much imagery of the moon is just plain greyscale or the Earth's atmosphere washes out any color variation of it. Aristarchus crater is notable and probably surrounded by an abundance of the red soil Apollo 17 found.
