Lunar Photography of the Day

On November 16, Chuck Wood announced that the Lunar Photography of the Day website will come to an end on December 31.

That is, he (Chuck, the one who has written almost all of the scientific comments of this wonderful site for “lunatics” like me) will not continue to select, post and comment images strongly or less strongly related to the Earth’s only natural satellite: the Moon.

This is sad news for me, since in the last 10 years I have become dependent on this website, reading almost all of the daily posts each morning. My fascination with the Moon started 13-14 years ago, but at the time I had very little to read from or search in about the Moon besides some old books. LPOD introduced a new way of communication between amateur lunar imagers and lunar scientists (like Chuck Wood), namely very good or highly relevant images of lunar formations sent by amateurs were selected and afterwards commented in a scientific manner, with information about the geology, history or other observations. Some new discoveries were made in this way (new rimae, domes or other features, unseen before in Apollo images due to the different illumination or lack of images altogether), and the most important part for me (as an amateur astronomer) was that they were made from amateur images, not orbiting probes data or giant ground telescopes pictures. More recently, the LROC data had become available and finally we had an extremely high resolution map of the Moon via the Internet, which can be consulted at any time. But it wouldn’t be very usable (besides the resolution part) in bringing new information about the Moon if scientific comments like the ones on the LPOD site would not accompany those lunar images.

So, what LPOD did change was the kind of information and the way it was received by those interested in the Moon.

I must say that besides the actual information extracted from the images by Chuck, I was also highly interested about the images themselves, especially by those of some of the best lunar imagers in the World, like Damian Peach, Wes Higgins, Mike Wirths, Paolo Lazzarotti and others. It was here that I’ve started to grasp some of the knowledge of creating high resolution lunar images (and I’m still learning, being far from what the above-mentioned “professional-amateurs” have done).

And another thing…

It was on LPOD that I had my very first image posted on an international website, on February 22, 2008. Since that date, Chuck Wood selected some of my images for 43 LPOD’s, which makes me quite proud for having a lunar scientist selecting and commenting my amateur images.

Thank you Chuck for making my imaging effort worth something!

Luckily the LPOD database will be held in place for some time (hopefully forever) so I and others like me (interested in lunar science) will have a website with interesting information about the Earth’s Moon.

And since I’ve mentioned the 43 LPOD’s:

Again, thank you Chuck for the LPOD site!

Long live LPOD!

Max