Digital Lunar Pictures

Scientists will now be able to see how the moon has changed in the years since the Apollo missions. A new NASA project called the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) has restored 42-year-old images taken of and from the moon. All images will be made available to the public.

The biggest benefit from digitizing these photos is to see the even the smallest changes to the lunar surface over the past 40-plus years. The images originally were taken in the 1960s by camera. These images were put on magnetic tapes and then transferred to film.

LOIRP has transferred the original analog data from 1,500 tapes and changed them into digital form.

"This project is an opportunity to revel in what was done in the past," said Pete Worden, director of Ames Research Center where LOIRP is based, "and get excited about what we're doing in the future."

I think this digitizing of photos is great because now these photos will last much longer on Earth and will be in much higher resolution. Plus, since I will probably never get to actually go to the moon, looking at the quality pictures of the moon is great!

The image at the top of this blog is the "image of the century" which was the first picture ever taken where Earth is seen from another celestial body. You can see the north coast of Africa and the glint of the sun on the Atlantic ocean.

The World of Digital Books

All over the world, books are going digital.  Last week, American authors and publishers reached an agreement with Google for it to sell electronic versions of copyrighted works that have gone out of print. 

"Almost overnight, not only has the largest publishing deal been struck, but the largest bookshop in the world has been built, even if it is not quite open for business yet," wrote Neill Denny, editor of The Bookseller, a London-based trade publication.

Right now, the bookshop would operate only in the US. And this agreement is only one of the ways books are making a technological leap.

This month, a group of European national libraries and archives plan to open Europeana - an online database of two million books, films, paintings, newspapers, and sound clips.

In Japan, the mobile phone is a popular way to read e-books. Sales of digital manga comic books are leading the way, and Penguin is optimistic about selling e-books to mobile phone users in India.

Stanza is an application for the iPhone that lets people read e-books. About half a million in more than 50 countries have downloaded this application.

I think all of these new initiatives to digitize books are great! I would definitely take advantage of reading e-books, whether it be on a mobile phone or on a device like the Kindle. I think reading the books on a mobile phone is an especially great idea because I take my phone with me wherever I go; that means whenever I have a free moment, I can just whip out my phone and read a book.