New Photo of Neil Armstrong on the Moon

There are famously no good photos of Neil Armstrong on the Moon. This was because for most of the time that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were on the lunar surface, Armstrong had the camera, and so most of the historic photographs taken during the Apollo 11 mission, show Buzz Aldrin. Neil can be seen in the grainy TV and film footage, and his back can be seen in a panorama, but now, Mike Constantine of Moonpans.com has added a new photo of Neil to the list.

(PRWEB) July 16, 2008 -- There are famously no good photos of Neil Armstrong on the Moon. This was because for most of the time that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were on the lunar surface, Armstrong had the camera, and so most of the historic photographs taken during the Apollo 11 mission, show Buzz Aldrin. Neil can be seen in the grainy TV and film footage, and his back can be seen in a panorama, but now, Mike Constantine of Moonpans.com has added a new photo of Neil to the list.

This new and exclusive photo made by Mike Constantine of Moonpans.com, is one of the only images of Neil Armstrong standing on the surface of the moon. But the funny part is, that Neil took the photo himself! It is actually a close up shot of Buzz Aldrin's reflective visor, which shows the Neil as the photographer as a mirror image.

Using digital imaging techniques we zoomed in on Buzz's visor and cropped, flipped and de-sphered, the reflection to get the rare shot of Armstrong as Buzz would have looked back at him during the famous shot.

The reason no proper photos were taken of Neil Armstrong on the moon, was because Neil had the camera most of the time, so there are plenty of shots of Buzz but almost none of Armstrong.

Incidentally, the small blue dot at the top of the photo is actually the Earth!

How the photo was made

After getting hold of a highest resolution scan possible of the famous Buzz Aldrin Visor Shot, Mike cropped out the Visor part and set about stretching and manipulating the image to overcome the spheracle effect of the visor, he then had to correct the color away from the Gold sheen that the visor had. Lastly the image was flipped to show how Neil actually would have looked to Buzz, rather than his mirror image.

More info on photos of Neil Armstrong on the moon

The only other and perhaps a more impressive photo of Neil Armstrong on the Moon, is the panorama that Buzz captured showing Neil working at the MESA (Modularized Equipment Stowage Assembly) of Lunar Module, Eagle. This is the Moonpans.com assembly . It was assembled from 8 separate photos to form a single seamless panoramic photgraph. Virtual Reality Movies from all the Apollo Missions are available on the Moonpans Website

Apollo 11 blasted off from Cape Canaveral on July 16 1969 and landed on the Moon on July 20th 1969. Neil Armstrong then became the first man to walk on the moon.

Moonpans.com started in 2003 assembling the panoramic photos that were taken on the Apollo missions. Now they supply Apollo panoramic prints, Astronaut autographs, memorabila flown to the Moon and work with space museums on large panoramic backdrops.

Source: PRWeb