7/20/05 | 10:07 am | Google Moon Launches
I woke up this morning and fired up trusty FireFox as normal. Google is my home page and I always enjoy it when they change out the graphic to fit with the holiday or other special day. This being July 20, the anniversary of the first manned Moon Landing in 1969, they changed the graphic to a moon themed one.
But not only that… usually when you click the graphic you get related Google results. This time you get Google Moon, an addition of NASA Moon imagery to Google Maps. A very cool thing… it looks like the Google staff themselves are having fun with google mashups.
I am not sure if they will keep this up forever or what (a lot of their experimental subdomains have a habit of disappearing after awhile, although many people will attempt to mirror them). Anyhow, there are only 8 notches on the zoom sliding scale, but that’s enough to play around with looking for aliens on the moon. If you find any habitations, I want half credit for it for Scavengeroogle, haha.
Actually, my favorite thing is what you get if you zoom in to 8/8. Instead of the usual “Sorry we don’t have satellite imagery at this magnification”, you get what is pictured at left. =) It’s nice to see the Google Engineers have a sense of humor. Also, the humor continues if you read their “Google Moon Help”, especially the section on the development of their lunar hosting research center… haha. I think I will apply for this…
