When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon, they did what any tourist would do — take hundreds of photos.
A few of these images are more famous than others, like the one of Aldrin with Armstrong reflected in his visor, and the one of Aldrin looking at the American flag.
But people at NASA and contributors to the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal have painstakingly uploaded every single one of the photos from all six moon landings onto the Journal’s website and Flickr page.
And what they’ve done that’s really cool is figure out how some of them fit together to assemble larger photos, showing the lunar surface in unprecedented detail.
They even animated a few consecutive photos into GIFs, making you feel like you’re on the Moon with Armstrong and Aldrin.
Here are 17 unbelievable constructed panoramas and GIFs from the historic Apollo 11 moon landing.
In this animated GIF of photos of the Earth, it looks like our planet is rising just like the Moon does.
Armstrong and Aldrin took these images out the window of their lander before they walked on the Moon.
It was important to have something to bring back in case they had to abort the mission.
Source: NASA
You can see how this panorama was stitched together from several photos.
Armstrong photographs Aldrin scooting out of the lander.
Aldrin prepares to take his first step on the Moon.
Now that they’re on the ground, they can start to explore their surroundings.
They got pretty far away from the lander.
You can see how flat it is where they landed, compared to large craters nearby.
This is one of the few images taken of Armstrong. You can barely see him close to the lander. Aldrin’s shadow is also in the foreground.
Aldrin took this series of photographs that include the American flag and the lander.
Armstrong photographs Aldrin removing an instrument called the passive seismometer.
Here’s a GIF of the same action:
Once they had conducted their experiments and taken many photos, it was finally time to go home. They shot these images out the windows of the lander.
Apollo Lunar Surface Journal contributor Bob Farwell even added the image of Armstrong and Aldrin erecting the flag that a camera mounted to the lander took to give a full view of what that looked like.
One last look at the flag before it’s time to go.
And away the lunar lander launched, back to the Apollo 11 command module (where pilot Michael Collins took this series of photos), and then finally back to Earth.
