themoon

Using the moon as your main light source for late-night photography can be beautiful, surreal... and challenging. But photographer Karl Taylor has a neat trick up his sleeve that can save you hours worth of test shooting in this situation—the trick is called "math."

Someday, when the first humans walk on Mars -- after they've taken a commemorative "one small step for man" selfie, of course -- they will turn their iPhone 27's back towards Earth and snap a photo of their home planet that might look something like the image above.

Short and sweet, the video above is also impressive. Although it might seem banal enough -- what's so special about a video of the moon going through a full rotation? -- what you're looking at is a super-high resolution time-lapse that shows all of the Moon, including the part that's never visible from Earth. And it was all made possible by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The title sort of gives it away, but did you know that there is an online archive that contains high-resolution film scans from every Apollo mission? The gallery contains all of the incredible photos taken during each of the missions -- from Apollo 1 all the way through Apollo 17 -- with some 1,000+ photos from Apollo 11 alone.

We've seen photography of the Moon, and photography taken on the Moon; people have even left photography gear up there. But this is the first we've heard of a photo from Earth, not only making it to the Moon, but staying there.

Fortunately, it was left there on purpose (Can you imagine? "Uhhh ... John ... we need to turn around, I forgot something..."), and the story behind the picture goes something like this.