Artist Reveals Hidden Secrets Of NASA’s Iconic Moon Landing Photo

Thanks to the hard work of one talented artist, new details of the iconic NASA moon landing from 1969 have been revealed. This comes at a time where space interest and exploration are coming back in a big way. NASA hopes to put the first humans on Mars by 2030, private companies like Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin are working to make space tourism a reality, and there continue to be talks of humans colonizing the moon as yet another home away from Earth.

As exciting as all of these new developments are, none of it would have been possible had it not been for that first moon landing 52 years ago. On July 16, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins departed Earth on Apollo 11. The crew landed on the lunar surface on July 20, where Neil Armstrong made his famous remark of “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” This is also where Neil Armstrong took the above photo of Buzz Aldrin standing on the moon, which has since become one of the most famous in space exploration history.

Five decades since that photo was captured, VFX artist and Reddit user Michael Ranger (also known as u/rg1213) has managed to breathe new life into it using modern photo editing tools. The photo of Buzz Aldrin is impressive enough on its own, but what if it was possible to see what the moon looked like from Aldrin’s point of view? That might sound like an impossible feat, but it’s exactly what Ranger managed to do. He took a high-resolution copy of the iconic photo, zoomed in on Aldrin’s visor, and then ‘unwrapped’ it by turning the photo into a 360-degree panoramic image and then opening it in Google Maps Street View. As Ranger says, since the visor is “essentially a mirror ball,” he was able to use the 360-degree format to make the visor reflection look like a standard 2D image.

Here’s What The New Moon Landing Photo Looks Like

That’s the background of how Ranger created the photo that he did, but how did the final result turn out? Just take a look at the picture above. While some of the details are slightly wrapped, and the resolution isn’t the sharpest, keep in mind this was all created using the reflection of Aldrin’s visor from a photo that’s over 50 years old. Even with those caveats, it’s still easy to see Armstrong holding the Hasselblad camera that captured the original picture, the American flag behind him, and the Eagle lunar module that Armstrong and Aldrin used to land on the moon. At the very top right of the edited photo, it’s also possible to see a faint glimpse of the Earth nearly 239,000 miles away.

To say that Ranger’s work with this photo is impressive is a considerable understatement. Here’s a photo that’s 52 years old. Thanks to the work of one person and some simple editing tools, there’s suddenly an entirely new perspective for it. As one Reddit user commented, “It’s kind of eerie. This is an unintended, unanticipated photo. It’s literally people 52 years in the future using modern technology to catch a new perspective of the past.”

Source: Michael Ranger (via Reddit)

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Joe Maring
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Joe has been actively writing and talking about consumer tech since 2012. His biggest passion lies with smartphones, but he’s happy to talk your ear off about just about anything with a CPU. He lives in Kalamazoo, MI with his wife, two cats, and pit bull/boxer mix.

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