Some high-quality photos from Chang'e 3!

[knocker]

 

Once again, tips from helpful users at nasaspaceflight.com and from Twitter have led me to a new pile of photos from the Chang'e 3 mission. And these are the best-quality ones I've seen yet. Almost all of the images I've seen to date have been shared through a bizarre roundabout method of projecting them on a screen, then filming them with a video camera, then aired on television, and then screen-grabbed. These photos are different: they are clearly direct from the original digital data. They're still not perfect -- they have been downsampled, contrast-enhanced, watermarked, and JPEG-compressed -- but they're so, so much better than what I've seen before, rich with detail and nuanced in color. They were also accompanied by a little bit of information about when they were taken, which is great. Here's the trove of images.

 

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2014/01100912-finally-some-high-quality-change3.html