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Readers!

 

It is now July, time once again to celebrate the start of this webpage in 2010 with my annual July fund-raising campaign.

 

This year I celebrate the fifteenth anniversary since I began Behind the Black. During that time I have done more than 33,000 posts, mostly covering the global space industry and the related planetary and astronomical science that comes from it. Along the way I have also felt compelled as a free American citizen to regularly post my thoughts on the politics and culture of the time, partly because I think it is important for free Americans to do so, and partly because those politics and that culture have a direct impact on the future of our civilization and its on-going efforts to explore and eventually colonize the solar system.

 

You can’t understand one without understanding the other.

 

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Luna-25 takes first image of lunar surface

Luna-25's first lunar image
Click for interactive map. Zeeman is located on the lower left.

Russia’s state-run press today issued the first picture taken by Luna-25 after entering lunar orbit two days ago. That picture, to the right and cropped and reoriented to post here, shows part of Zeeman Crater at 75 degrees south latitude and 135 degrees west, on the far side of the Moon. From the TASS announcement:

“The Luna-25 spacecraft, flying in a circular orbit as the Moon’s artificial satellite, has taken pictures of the lunar surface with television cameras of the STS-L system. The image, taken today at 08:23 Moscow time, shows the southern polar crater Zeeman on the far side of the Moon. The coordinates of the crater center are 75 degrees south and 135 degrees west,” the state corporation said. Roscosmos said the Zeeman crater is of great interest to researchers. Its rim rises eight kilometers above its relatively flat floor.

The picture shows Zeeman’s southern rim to the left, with its pockmarked crater floor to the right. The crater the lander is targeting, Broguslawsky Crater, sits in the opposite hemisphere of Zeeman, slightly closer to the south pole but on the Moon’s near side.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

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