The actual epoch chosen was the time of the first moon landing, a little prior to 1-Jan-1970 (I like this touch, something with actual historical significance and likely documentable to a fraction of a second, rather than an arbitrary date).
The history of the first map of the other half of the Moon is no less dramatic. Actually, the very first image of the back side of the Moon was destroyed immediately after creation.
I've never given it much thought but the first thing that hit me is that the moon really is just a big 'ol rock up in the sky. These images have changed the way I view the moon. Pretty neat.
Published in 2010, a controversial hypothesis about the origin of the Moon proposes that the Moon may have been formed from the explosion of a georeactor located along the core-mantle boundary at the equatorial plane of the then-rapidly rotating Earth, 4.5 billion years ago.
Whoa, I didn’t know that was even an option. I thought Verneshots were scary, but that’s just orders of magnitude more impressive.
Only in the sense that it's moving. These are, apparently, actual images of the Moon. I suspect it's a typo, and the images are from 2010, but I don't know.
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