Ever hanker to take a gander at the lunar crater Zwicky? If so, just click over to a slick new site on the web called The-moon. There, you will quickly learn that Zwicky is a 94-mile-wide (150 kilometers) crater at latitude 15.4° south, longitude 168.1° east. You can also find out that Fritz Zwicky (1898–1974) "was an American-based Swiss astronomer. He was an original thinker, with many important contributions in theoretical and observational astronomy." Zwicky and hundreds of other lunar features are yours for the gandering on The-moon — arranged conveniently in alphabetical order.
The-moon is a Wiki. Like the well-known Wikipedia, it is a collaborative web site containing written and visual information about Earth's satellite that anyone can contribute to and edit. The idea is to increase and refine the site's content over time.
The introduction to the site is written by Chuck Wood, a scientist currently with the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona. He has many interests, but I think it's fair to say Dr. Wood is nuts about the Moon.
Wood doesn't specifically mention amateur observers, but what better project for them to be involved in? Anyone can upload photos, descriptions, and history of lunar features. Plus, there are lots of existing collections of Moon images out there to be plundered (assuming they are not copyrighted) and added to The-moon.
Speaking of collections, a lot of people are over the Moon about the release of super-high-resolution scans of Apollo-era photographs. The digital archive is being created by Arizona State University and NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. Instead of the lesser-quality reproductions previously available, these scans are being made from the original negatives, many of which have been in cold storage for decades.
The scans will contain an unprecedented amount of detail. For example, a scan of a single 4.7-inch-square frame from the Apollo Mapping Camera — one of the instruments used to photograph the lunar surface — will contain 1.3 gigabytes of data. Scans will reproduce 16,000 shades of gray. The project will take about 3 years to complete and will scan some 36,000 images.
In a way, we'll all be seeing the Moon as we've never seen it before. Maybe somebody will finally catch a glimpse of the wires and nails holding up the movie stage in Nevada where the Apollo program was faked.