Celebrating the 40th anniversary of the first manned moon landing of the Apollo 11 mission, my blog header will display images that roughly follow the course of the mission from the launch on July 16 to the moon landing on July 20 to the return on July 24 (even though the actual timeline isn’t matching exactly1) – here’s a little appetizer in thumbnail size:

(These images still have to randomly share their spot with “Zensursula”, protesting the installation of an internet censorship infrastructure in Germany, falsely pretending to effectively fight child pornography.)

The photos are of course from NASA (and as such in the public domain), some taken from Wikimedia Commons, some from this exhaustive NASA Image Library.

The Big Picture currently also shows a nice selection of photos.

A great site re-creating the mission in a “re-live” kind of way and offering many images etc. is WeChooseTheMoon.org – check it out! (via)

Oh, and those still doubting the moon landings were real should have a look at Bad Astronomy or Clavius.

1. and the launch photo is actually from Apollo 15, the rocket stage split from Apollo 6 [↩]