 Okay, welcome to the December webinar of the NASA night sky network every month We highlight an activity related to the webinar topic this month We are looking at an iconic image of the earth rising above the lunar horizon Taken during the Apollo 8 mission 50 years ago Well, we're all familiar with the phases of the moon as seen from earth It is an interesting question opposed during an outreach event Does the earth have phases when viewed from the moon and does it appear to move across the sky? The same as we see the moon from earth. Here's Dave with an activity to help your visitors consider these questions Okay, I think I'm set up. So a lot of these um, this particular one is from the moon phases portion of the shadows and silhouettes toolkit, so Kind of a little of a part of Sort of an outreach activity So this one I'll just go through the quickie part which is that does the moon rotate So you got your model of the earth and you got a model of the moon And you can use the ones in the kid or you can you know making the tennis balls or whatever marbles But I like to using a little foam ball for the moon because we've got a little Pin here. You can use a toothpick or thumbtack or whichever This is just handy to indicate the side of the moon you want facing the earth Which is the near side the side we always see and so as you move the moon As you orbit the moon around the earth you want to keep that pointed and so by keeping that pointed you end up Noticing that you're rotating the moon Which then you answer the question of does the moon rotate now? It's a little easier when you do it with like a you can really get it when you have a couple of people So say someone standing there is here Someone is the moon and I've limited mobility here We got a little bit of space But you can see as you walk around you really have to force your whole body to rotate now Imagining that you're on the moon you can end up So if you imagine say you're on the far side So far side never points towards you so imagine yourself there looking out And you're trying to you're orbiting the earth, but you're never actually going to see the earth As you're always pointed away But if you were actually on the other side you would look straight at the earth And you would actually see as you go around the earth as you're both going around the Sun But the earth is going through phases, but that You might not see it move very much in the sky so While the Apollo astronauts got to see earth rises they were orbiting if you're actually sitting on the surface of the moon You might not see earth at all, or you might see it up in the sky changing its phase Generally you're not going to actually see it Not going to really see it move around very much Maybe a little bit especially if you're right near the edges of the moon like those little vibration Lot areas there that kind of gets into a whole other section and topic, but I want to really get on to finding out more about Earth rise and the visualizations in Apollo 8 so that's it for me, and you can I'll post a link to this Activity in our chat, and you can check it out yourself and have fun playing around with it at home It's a great activity and if your eyes are adjusted enough and you run out of stuff to look at under a full moon Do it then too Thanks Dave Now for our featured program Ernie writes, but a computer graphics Has been using computer graphics to visualize scientific data for over 25 years his early work included cloud Visualization for the Defense Nuclear Agency Weapon Effects Directorate and train visualization for the Central Intelligence Agency Office of Imagery Analysis He was also a lightwave 3d senior programmer and has been the host of The internet mailing list and the author of the lightwave sensor server development kids since 2008 He's been a programmer and animator at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center scientific visualization studio Working primarily with the data from Lunar Chronoson's orbit is a BS in computer and information science with a minor in communication from the University of Maryland University College He's a member of his local astronomy club and still owns the Apollo era 60 millimeter f11.7 refractor that his father bought through the Sears catalog Please welcome Ernie Wright Hi there, so I'm unmuted and hopefully everybody can hear me Um, yeah, so yes already good I'm coming to you from my home office, which I shared with Brian and Dave a little earlier my wife forced me to clean up before we went on the air here and What I'd like to show you first is the website for the scientific visualization studio So like Brian said I work at the SVS And what we do is take NASA data and Create scientific animations with that and that's primarily for public outreach and so Hopefully you're seeing the website now and If you need to find it it's at svs.gsfc.nasa.gov But sometimes it's just easier to search for NASA svs and this is usually the first link that comes up. So this is the home page One of the things that I've been doing for several years now is a phases of the moon page It's currently nearly new moon, but of course in About 20 days when we get to Christmas it will be a little bit past full so you can put in any day an hour and And hopefully I will get the 2019 version of this out in the next week or two. It's what I'm working on right now But what I want to talk to you about today is the the Earthrise Image that was taken by the Apollo 8 astronauts on Christmas Eve of 1968 And before I really get into it I want to show you the video that I made that Recreates this event and then I'm going to explain how I recreated it and What that sort of told us about the picture that we didn't know before so let's see if we can get this video to play impact crater with at Just prior to the sub solar point on the south side in the floor of it It leaves if there is one dark hole But I couldn't get a quick enough look at it To see if it might be anything volcanic. Yeah, look at that picture over there Coming up. Wow that's pretty And I'll take that's not schedule You got a color film Jim And they roll a color man. That's crazy quick down here. Just grab me a color and color exterior No one Yeah, look at my one C368 anything Yeah, I got it right here So I got a phrase it's very clear right here Oh Hopefully that played okay. I haven't had great luck with playing video So I wanted to play it in a smaller window and see if that would work but I've put the URL for this page On the screen It's number 4129 at the SPS website and it has a Seven-minute version of this video which is narrated by Andy Chacon and sort of explains Some of what I'm going to tell you today And it also has the individual pieces So if you have a video project that you want to incorporate some of this we You know, we invite you to come to the website and grab whatever pieces of this that you'd like and That's true for almost everything on the SPS website. That's kind of what it's here for Almost everything on it is is in the public domain and we'd love for you to come and use it for whatever outreach projects that you might have So let me make that big And start to tell you what you saw I Work at the scientific visualization studio Most of the people in the studio work on earth science, but I am the moon guy So I get to work primarily with data from lunar reconnaissance orbiter and I'm really fortunate because LRO has a lot of data It's been in orbit around the moon since the summer of 2009 and It's collected more data than all the other planetary missions from NASA combined That's primarily because It's really close to us compared to the other missions. So our bandwidth is higher and it's also been there for a very long time Our bandwidth is something like 500 times what it was for Cassini So we have loads and loads of data and what LRO is doing is Mapping the surface with cameras with lasers that measure altitude with thermal instruments neutron detectors all of this to prepare for Future astronauts to go and that's why it's called a reconnaissance orbiter To give you an idea of What a difference the LRO data has made this is a computer rendering of Schrodinger basin, which is an impact feature near the South Pole and This is using the best elevation data. We had in 2005 And you can see all kinds of artifacts in it, but using LRO data that same basin looks like this and We can now also add data from the Grail mission which was measuring The gravity of the moon and created a complete global gravity map and so that's what the colors are indicating here Red is stronger gravity and blue is weaker This sort of uneven gravity reflects the thickness of the crust and Metals maybe that are buried underneath the surface but this was We started to learn about this when we went to the moon in the 1960s and we discovered that the orbits weren't perfectly elliptical like they should have been and You may have heard the term mass con for mass concentration and that's what this is mapping here So I'm here to talk about this beautiful image Taken on Christmas Eve of 1968 This image represents the first time that the earth was seen by human eyes over the horizon of another world And it had a huge impact. It's it's a little hard for us to sort of Imagine what that was like unless we were there Because we take for granted that we can see the earth from space now But in 1968 this was a huge deal And in fact the the legacy of this image Continues in all kinds of publications up to the present day. I mean we made a stamp out of it It was on the cover of the second whole earth catalog a British historian named Robert pool wrote an entire book about the idea of seeing the earth from space and and what that means for our our conception of the planet that we live on and it's really common for Compilations of Great photographs or just the history of the 20th century to feature this image on the cover so it's certainly an iconic image and As we just saw I had an opportunity to recreate the circumstances of that image The idea for this came to me when my wife Got me a poster for Christmas of the Earthrise image and I was kind of staring at it. I thought I could probably do this in the computer Because that's basically what I do. I take LRO data And using 3d animation software find ways to exhibit it find engaging ways to exhibit it to the public So I thought this would be a cool idea And as we saw in the video they actually took three pictures On the fourth orbit just as they were coming around from the far side of the moon So In order to and I'm sorry. This is the only like big text screen I'm gonna have but in order to recreate this I had to figure out the Geometry of the you know the positions of the Sun the Earth the moon and Apollo 8 orbit I Have to texture the moon so that means getting the color and the shape of the moon, right? And also texture the earth which is a little unusual for me because I'm usually looking at the moon And I'll kind of go through What that involved? This is the 3d animation software that I use the little green Wireframe is the camera that actually renders the image that I want to see And what I've done here is Put the camera in orbit around the moon in the same position as Apollo 8 Around the time that the that the earth rise photograph was taken But in order to do that I had to figure out the Apollo 8 orbit There's really no web resource or or easy way to find that so I had to sort of figure it out from 1960s documents that look like this Um I won't dive too deep into this, but I'll let you know that the the top few lines are Uh, what we call a state vector. So the xyz position and also the xyz Velocity, which way is it pointing? Which way is it going and how fast is it going? Um, and using just that information we can infer an orbit Um that looks like this Um, it's wavy like that because the orbit was inclined about 12 degrees To the equator of the moon meaning it was tilted by that much um so Once I figured out where to put the camera um, I can look through the camera and see what the astronauts saw and uh, in particular There's a timeline at the bottom of this software And I can grab that timeline and sort of scrub through it And once I've set up the scene correctly, I can actually see the earth rising Above the surface and kind of get an idea of when exactly that picture was taken um, so To make the moon look like it does was kind of the easy part of this This is the color of the moon, uh using lunar reconnaissance orbiter Um camera data Um, and this is for the area near where the earth raised picture was taken and then When we add the elevation data, we get the shape of that terrain um The earth was a kind of a a challenge. Um This is a global mosaic that I guarantee you've seen in a hundred different places It was created by another group at Goddard Space Flight Center called earth observatory. It's a mosaic of images from An instrument called modus that's flying on satellites called terra and aqua and they stitched together Thousands of images. They had to pick All the images that had no clouds in them Um, and it was a real challenge in some parts of the world Uh, and they made they actually made 12 mosaics one for each month of the year to show Sort of representative ice and snow cover on the land um, but This image for me has a couple of problems when they process the image They actually subtracted the effect of the atmosphere. So this is what the ground would look like if there were no air in the way Um, but I had to make it look more realistic the way the astronauts saw it So I had to sort of add those effects back in Um, this made the ocean a much lighter color blue And it also took away a lot of the green Um, something the astronauts have said is that you don't see a lot of green that gets scattered away by the atmosphere particularly if you're far away Um, I've also added sea ice So the the glaciers that are covering, uh, the north pole to south pole greenland And in a way that's appropriate to the season um, so The last piece is the clouds And it would be really lovely if I could find satellite data that showed the global cloud pattern in 1968 But what were the odds that I would be able to find that right? Um, in fact, we already had weather satellites that were taking global data And at the time of the earth rise This data was being taken by a satellite called isa seven And this is what the daily mosaic looked like for december 24th It's a little ugly, but one of the things that i'm often called on to do is, uh Fix this data so that the the the artifacts in it aren't distracting. I mean, this is not This is not the purpose of the video to show these clouds. So I have a little bit of freedom to Make artistic corrections to it and What that looks like is we sort of cut out all of the parts we don't want We get rid of the continent outlines and the and the latitude and longitude grid We project it onto a flat map that I can use And then we fill in the parts that Are missing with some fairly typical cloud patterns um, and so What we finally get to is A pretty decent looking earth. Um, so In this image The earth on the left is from the earth rise photograph And the earth on the right is the one that I was able to make The Eastern half of africa is on the bottom South america is on the top Antarctica is in the south pole around the left and north pole is on the right So We can do various comparisons between the photographs and the and the images that I can render to make sure that I'm getting this Getting this right You can see that the cloud pattern is consistent between the two and the terrain matches up pretty well And the other thing we can do is sort of flip back and forth That's what it looks like with the photograph superimposed on the rendering and then without it So And there were there were other pictures taken In later orbits that were harder to time unless You're able to put it into a 3d program like this and and compare The Continents aren't always visible Particularly in stuff like this But The cloud patterns become really important for for timing figuring out which orbit these photographs were taken on And matching them up So Once I have The scene set up and the camera in the right place and I can sort of scrub through that timeline I know The exact times when these pictures were taken and that was something that we hadn't known before Which was pretty cool But as I was working on this Some people found out that I was working on it and and weren't quite sure that they wanted to believe it and in particular One of the Apollo 8 astronauts bill anders Didn't believe that it was possible to do this. I mean he pointed out That there are no timers on the camera. So this is nothing like, you know, the time stamped digital photos that we're accustomed to now They were on the far side of the moon. They hadn't come back around And acquired signal from the earth yet. So there was no telemetry And you can't he said you can't hear the shutter clicks Of the camera in the audio that they took as they were looking at this well I hadn't even thought to listen for the camera until he Made this objection and I thought well, let's listen carefully and see if we can And if you listen to it, you actually can hear the shutter clicks, which is cool Because they happen at exactly the same time in the audio as the Picture match happens in the video. So that was kind of a confirmation that the visualization was doing something right Um Bill actually came all the way out to Goddard. He lives in near Seattle, but he flew out to Maryland to Goddard and sat in my office and You know said prove it to be and so I went through it kind of the way I'm going through it with you now and and showed him everything I did And he's now convinced which is great Because for a reason that I will reveal shortly Um Another person that got interested in this and found out I was working on it is uh, andy chacon um Andy wrote the book a man on the moon, um, which is still Probably the definitive account of apollo. Um, he's a space historian. Um, he is still working with nasa. There's another picture of him Behind alan stern as new horizons flew past pluto and So in talking to him in particular became clear to me that there were still things about this picture that we didn't know um For example, I wasn't aware that nobody could agree on who took the picture Um, you would think you could just ask the astronauts, but the astronauts didn't agree Both frank mormon and billy ender's claimed to have taken the picture Um, and after years of listening to them go back and forth Jim lovell decided that he would claim to take the picture too just because he felt left out um so Andy it wanted to know if there was a way that we could use this visualization to nail down who actually took the photograph And it turns out that there there was um Mounted inside the capsule it was automatically taking pictures of the surface every 20 seconds um, this was mounted in And as you look at the sequence of images You can see that the spacecraft must have been rotating Because the images rotate They go through a full 180 degrees um, so not only does this tell us that it was rotating but The ability to match those photographs with lro terrain data Can give us the exact timing of that rotation and What's important about that is that's why They were able to see the earth rise um And why it took until orbit for for them to see it Prior to that they'd been flying with the windows facing backwards Because after all they were there to look at the surface of the moon and photograph it report on it They weren't there to look at the earth It wasn't until the start of orbit four that they started to turn the spacecraft around And face the windows forward And at just that moment the earth was coming up over the horizon um So that's why they saw it then and why they were so surprised But the turn is important for another reason um The only person that could have seen the earth first the only person who could have said Um, oh my god. Look at that. It's the earth coming up. Wow. Isn't that pretty? Was bill anders because he was sitting next to window five And the earth appeared in window five first And was not visible to the other two crewmen um We know that frank was sitting in his seat with his hand on the control Uh actually piloting the roll maneuver um When he came back, you know, there were automatic Systems that he could have just pressed a button to do this roll, but he didn't trust them So he always sat in his seat put his hand on the on the joystick and actually did those rolls by hand So we know that he wasn't floating around the capsule doing other things. He was driving the spacecraft And sitting next to window one um and Part of the confusion Is that the official nasa transcript? misattributes that first line that oh my god line to frank But it's it was clear to andy when he listened to it that bill was the one that said it But we also know that bill was the only one that could have seen the earth and said that because he was sitting next to window five um so Using the the role of the spacecraft and the timing of that um We can say for sure now not only what time All three of those photographs are taken but also which window they were taken out of And who took them and bill anders took all three of the photographs So That's pretty cool. Um that Just because I wanted to do a visualization that exhibited elro data in in a novel way um, we actually kind of went down this rabbit hole and found that the visualization could do sort of forensic history And identify the photographer and settle this question that had been open for You know 45 years at the time that uh that I worked on this originally All three of the astronauts asked me for dvd copies of the movie Even though it's online. These are guys who are not necessarily online savvy all the time And so I sent them I sent them all dvd copies And I got lovely thank you notes from everybody including frank borman um I just got the sweetest note from him and I was a little worried about that because it appeared that my video was kind of putting putting a nail in his story about Telling everybody that he had taken the earth rice photo But he seemed perfectly fine with that and and I think It's consistent with frank's personality. What was really important to him during that mission Was getting everybody back alive? There was no guarantee that that was going to happen This was the first time that astronauts had written on a Saturn 5 It was the first time that astronauts had left earth orbit You know, there were so many things that could have gone wrong You know frank's as a commander of the mission his priority was getting them back safely And that's what was on his mind the entire time And and he accomplished that so there's no question that that You know his legacy secure Um Andy and I would like to think uh that this video had another effect um In the 1960s when the astronauts were flying to the moon a number of craters were named for the astronauts and and this actually made some sense um Explorers usually get to name the places they visit But we can't do that the the precedent for the moon is that you have to be dead um So they took those names away and That's always stuck in bill anderskron in particular so Just a couple of months ago um Maybe as a result of this video sort of raising awareness of this mission um The iau decided that there would be two craters named to commemorate the Apollo 8 mission Um They invited bill anders to name one of them. He named it earth rise And the iau decided that they would call it anders's earth rise to emphasize that he was the one that took the photograph And frank borman named the other one and he called it eight homeward Which just reinforces what his priority was which was to get all of those guys back safely um So I think that's going to conclude the formal part of my Talk, but I am Certainly ready to answer questions if we have them Oh before I do that Links Like I said, it's the easiest way to find the svs website is just to search for nasa svs But you can certainly write that link down if you want um Moon dot nasa dot gov is everything moon This is a website that's run cooperatively by jpl with a lot of input from lunar reconnaissance orbiter and other sources of planetary information um and a great resource for uh in-depth Exploration of all of the Apollo missions is the Apollo flight journal um at history dot nasa dot gov uh slash afj They have complete transcripts of every mission And lots of annotations that explain what those guys were doing Including all the boring times when they were calling, you know coordinates up and down to each other and and measuring You know whether the evaporator was overheating and and all of this sort of routine Housekeeping stuff they explain it and it's it makes it interesting So I encourage everybody to to try out the Apollo flight journal as well Now i'm done and i'm ready to take questions All right, maybe you could now stop sharing your your screen And then we can come back if we need to So let's see if we can get some people. I think everyone was really Wrapped attention there So we did have one question But I think we answered it your cook was uh wondering about the videos available for download And that he'd love to be able to use them at their monthly planetarium outreach event And so I guess that would be a question, you know, somebody's using these in a planetarium They could you know, do you have any that are? You know take into account the curvature of the the dome or anything that might be for full dome, right? Not for not for Earthrise, but we do have several dome shows And it's possible to search for those specifically on the svs website We were one of the studios that contributed content to a show called dynamic earth Um and that's showing in a number of planetariums. Uh, all of the material for that is available Um, and we've done several other sort of dome Dome shaped renderings. Um, and you can find those on the website All right Well, doesn't that have anything to do with Apollo 8? But Barry is wondering if that scope behind you is the one that you've had for many many years Ah No, the the seerscope that was circa 1970 Is actually in the conference room of the studio I had a producer ask me about a year ago if I had a telescope that we could use as a prop And so it's a small refractor That's perfect for little kids to look through and He used it in a video and everybody decided that it would look great in the conference room The one that's behind me is a tv 85 and it's my grab and go Refractor so that's a three and a three and a third inch Refractor that I run outside and look at the moon with all the time Well, here's a question. We don't have any other uh, so everyone drops some questions in there. There's lots of interesting stuff here so Some of that, you know, you have all these great visualizations and using the data Did you do any consulting or did your Office do any consulting on some of the movies say first man? The biopic about, you know armstrong that you have any involvement with nasa visualizations for any of those No, we weren't I think the the consulting kind of went the other way. Um while I was working on this, uh, earth rise video um Not only was I talking to to andy chacon, but I was also talking to Uh, a guy named paul fjeld who is he was an artist at nasa during the apollo era and a little bit afterwards Um, he was also a technical consultant on the hbo series from the earth to the moon Um that was based on andy's book paul is obsessive about Getting everything just right so paul and I went over my 3d model of the Of the command and service module. We removed some handholds that had not yet been attached to the to the csm Because apollo. We didn't do any spacewalks We got the the color of the lights right and we sort of established whether or not they were blinking Um There were lots of little details that paul and I went over. Um, so I received consulting Right, uh, and so that was a large part of the several months that that we spent working on getting this right And we also heard from the astronauts about the color of the earth and that's where some of that came from Okay, so you alluded to something during during the I think one of the videos you're or maybe when you're explaining about the Visualization you said that you took a little bit of artistic license and maybe that had to do with the uh, What's the uh, earth rendering? Um, do you how much, you know, I know that you said that the one person you work with Wanted to get everything exactly right. Um, do you ever do anything with some latitude to kind of You know, how much artistic license do you take with things? Right, uh, well and that was kind of why I was pointing out that that um, I had a little bit of latitude with the clouds where I Might not feel like I would with some other data sets. Um, it depends on the context Um, very often the data we work with has uh, holes in it where, you know, the sensor, um, wasn't operating for a few seconds or Um, it has some other sort of, uh, stair step artifacts in it. Um, those are things that are distracting for people. They're, they're not, they don't contain actual information. And so, um, you know, the strategy there is to hide them. We don't want to damage data. We want to present the data, um, as, as pristinely as we can. But some data is pretty ugly. Um, so it depends entirely on the context. Uh, and we always make those decisions in consultation with the scientists who either collected the data or used it in some way, um, to make sure that we're not misleading anybody by sort of, you know, if we think we're just fixing a mistake and we're actually erasing, you know, real results, you know, we want people to step in and say, no, you can't do that. Um, so we, you know, we want to stick with quality. by sort of, you know, if we think we're just fixing a mistake and we're actually erasing, you know, real results, you know, we want people to step in and say, no, you can't do that. So we want to do that as little as possible. We want to have a very light touch. But the clouds on the earth are a good example of a situation where the clouds were not the story. And so, you know, the purpose of creating that earth model was just to get a reasonable earth. If I had messed with the terrain of the moon in order to get it to match the earthrise photo, then that would be tampering with evidence, you know. Instead of my matching that photograph, I would be painting something that looked like the photograph and that doesn't do anybody any good. So that's a consideration that we always have to think about. How is the data being used in the visualization? Are the things that we want to do things that will, you know, impair the data in some way? So we're always thinking about that. And it's kind of the reason that I called it out. I don't want to give people the impression that we just take data and paint over it willy-nilly, right? The whole point is to show the data, not to show our artistic whatever. So we want to do that as little as possible, but there are lots of times where the artifacts are just distracting and the artifacts are not information. They distract people from what the message is. So we balance those things. I know that there's a lot of visualization tools using NASA imagery that have become more available lately. NASA eyes that, you know, Kevin Hussie was on here, gave a webinar a year or so ago, and that was great. There's Lunar Trek and Mars Trek, and I think there's Vesta Trek now and where you get a chance to really visualize. Did you have any involvement in developing those or though making sure that the data was correct? Kevin Hussie and I sort of are two ships that pass in the night very often. We show up at the same events. No, I didn't have direct involvement in the development of those, but, you know, we all talk to each other and we all get ideas from each other. And we're also, you know, all about exploring new technologies. So the eyes on the solar system stuff is it's interactive, it's web-based, it's real-time. So you can, if you want to know where a particular satellite is, you can go there and it'll show you where it is right now. Something that we're experimenting with is 360 video because that's become very easy for people to access. You can upload a 360 video to YouTube and anybody can watch it. They don't need glasses or, you know, special equipment for that. And we're also, there's a group at Goddard that's working on sort of virtual reality and augmented reality. One of the ways that that can be used, there's a group that I'm working with that's going to make a very big map of the moon, like 25 feet wide and 25 feet tall. That's kind of like a rug that you can unroll in the lobby of your building for kids to sort of walk around on the moon and see various things. And the augmented reality aspect of that is, you hold your phone over the map. And as you pass over, you know, the Apollo 11 landing site, you know, the phone goes bloop and a video comes up or an explainer comes up. And you can do that for the landing sites of everything that's been on the moon, but also geological features. So as you walk over a lunar swirl or a Mare or, you know, any of those things, the augmented reality can sort of pop up and tell you about them. So while we're, you know, we're supposed to be all one NASA, we don't always, you know, talk to each other every day, but we are sort of cross pollinating and exploring new technologies. I love that idea, but the augmented reality with the rug down and you're walking across it, it kind of reminds me of in some ways of science on a sphere or something like that, where it's a way that you can interact with the science. You might interact with the phenomena. And it's a different way to show it. I really like science on a sphere too. I mean, it's limiting in some ways because it needs to be some spherical data set to begin with. And, but it's, in other ways, it's very cool. I mean, we were, we were on the West Coast when Maryland experienced one of its very infrequent earthquakes. And I happened to be in a museum out there that had a science on a sphere that was showing USGS earthquake data. And, and, you know, the light lit up over Maryland and I said, that's got to be wrong. That, that can't be wrong. And I can't be right. And 10 minutes later, I was getting texts from people who said, you know, books fell off shelves and things happened. And that doesn't happen in Maryland very often. And I was actually kind of, no, I was kind of, I was kind of bummed that I wasn't there to experience it. Because I've experienced earthquakes in California, but that's, you know, people hardly talk about them unless they get up to, you know, at least 5.5 or something. There are pretty common occurrence out there. Or the big one up in Alaska just a few days ago. Yeah. Some amazing pictures from that too. Just roads split in half and yeah. Well, Daniel and Julia asked, are there any other mysteries? I know that this has been something for a while. Their Sky and Telescope Magazine was trying to discover, you know, some of the circumstances of when people were painting their paintings based on the scene that they're putting. Are there any other mysteries that you're trying to solve with the computerization, with this visualization? I would love to do that. The Earthrise thing happened kind of by accident. I wasn't aware that there was a mystery to solve. And so I got kind of dragged into that without knowing where it would lead. I would love to pursue some other mysteries. Nothing comes to mind, but the, I love this idea of using modern sort of computer tools, modern astronomical tools to figure out, you know, was Van Gogh painting Starry Night from real life or was he painting it from memory? And things like that are, I love the crossover. My daughter's currently studying chemistry at Carnegie Mellon, but she also has an undergraduate degree in art. And I would like to think that she shares my real interest in finding ways that science and art can come together, because that's kind of the weird middle road that I travel all the time. So finding a way to figure out when a painting was done or finding some other way to connect the science to what everybody can appreciate is something I'm very enthusiastic about. So if I have another opportunity to do something like this, I'll definitely jump on it. Well, I always like to think that science and art, both of them are ways and are human responses to a phenomenon that we're experiencing. Yeah, absolutely. And they both involve careful observation a lot of times, right? So they're human experiences of the world. And there are a lot of ways that they're very similar. And I know my daughter could passionately make that argument as well, that there isn't the big dividing line that people think there is. I think there's a lot of ways that that art and science are very similar, actually. Well, even though I'm a science educator, I'm a big fan of arts education. So I think that this is a marvelous way to bridge that and to bring this in. And there's a lot of people who think that science is inaccessible. And this is just another way of making it more accessible and getting other people excited that maybe wouldn't get excited otherwise. Yeah, absolutely. And that's a big part of my job. The data that we look at is not very sexy when you see it in its raw form. And that's why most of us are actually programmers. We write software all the time that sort of converts this data into something that the 3D animation software can understand. But being able to render it in 3D, place it in context, so in context, in time, in space, it brings the data alive, I'd like to think, and makes it accessible to people in a way that it wouldn't be if they had to just look at the numbers. Well, I think we've got one more question here. And then we'll wrap this up. So Cook asked, could this virtual reality scenario be used in a simulator environment for future lunar landings? Yeah, I absolutely think so. And in fact, we've received some interests from some people who were thinking along those lines. So if I've done any consulting, it's more for that type of thing, helping people to find the data that LRO is gathering. And importantly, all of that data is publicly available. There's an archive called the Planetary Data System. And so if you search for LRO, PDS, you will find the entire archive of LRO data, millions of photographs, high resolution laser shots, lots of thermal data, neutron data. It's all available to the public, very, very important for all of us that want to put our hands on that data and do something with it ourselves. And actually, it's really easily available. I know that Lunar Trek has a layer upon layer upon layer, literally thousands of different layers with a lot of the data sets from LRO and El Croson. Brian Day, who is on the survey team, he's probably going to be along later on this spring to give us a tour of Lunar Trek and introduce us to some of the data and how people can use that and their outreach. And Brian's a great guide to take that tour with. Yeah, I know that the LRO camera team has created a thing called Quickmap, which is very much like Google Maps, but it's for all of the moon data that they've covered that they've collected. So it's all out there if anybody wants to go find it. Well, thank you so much, Ernie. This is absolutely wonderful. I love what you're doing. I love the image, of course. It's just absolutely marvelous. And it was really great to hear about your effort to kind of solve a couple of minor mysteries, one might say. Thanks, Brian. This is a great time for everybody to be looking at that image and thinking about it. We're only two weeks away from the 50th anniversary of this mission. You know, sometimes it gets overshadowed by 11. All of the missions kind of do. So I think it's great that we make the effort to recognize all of the astronauts that did this and all of the hundreds of thousands of people that worked on the program. And continue to work on the program. So thank you. And that's all for tonight, everyone. You can find this webinar along with many others on NASA Night Sky Network website in the Outreach Resources section. Each webinar's page also features additional resources and activities. We'll post tonight's presentation on the Night Sky Network YouTube channel in the next few days.