Image Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Published: June 18, 2014

To celebrate its 5th Anniversary, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission decided to hold a contest to pick a cover image for "The Moon As Art" collection.

This collection features a variety of beautiful visuals that were created using data gathered by LRO over the first 4.5 years of operations. 5 images were selected by the LRO team to put up for a public vote.

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Transcript

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It's been said that "art is science made clear." Just look to space if you need proof. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has brought this thought to life with a beautiful array of visuals from the moon.

Selecting the best image was what The Moon As Art campaign was all about.

LRO has thousands of photos and datasets to choose from, but just 24 were selected to be a part of The Moon as Art collection.

There are views of craters, ejecta blankets, and temperature maps. But only one image can be chosen to grace the cover. Of these candidates the LRO team selected 5 to put up for a public vote. First is "Starry Night."

Here, laser-created topography was used to bring us this colorful view of the slopes near the moon's south pole. Next is "Tycho Central Peak." This mountain peak is inside an impact crater, and has a bolder over 100 meters wide at its summit.

"Diviner North Pole" features nighttime temperatures at that location on the Moon. Colder spots are in blue, warmer in orange and red. Next up is "Linne Crater topography," where a digital terrain map was created using several images from the narrow angle camera, and color-coded to show differences in elevation.

"Clerke Crater" is the final option, where highly reflective granular debris can be seen flowing down its interior wall.

Now, after 2 weeks of online voting, the winner of The Moon As Art contest is . . .Tycho Central Peak - capturing 52% of votes. This beautiful photograph will be the face of The Moon As Art collection, thanks to you.

To see the collection in detail, visit the LRO website.

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