More interestingly, the catalog has numerous images which are: a) misnumbered, b) duplicate images with different numbers, c) numbered out of sequence and, d) blank.
As for the Navy's Top Secret Clementine Lunar mapping mission: Why the Navy? The spin is usually they had the money, so why not spend it before it is gone. But that spin presupposes the Navy had no other spending priorities for the millions the mission cost.
There are several resolutions of the publicly available images, but of those of the very highest resolutions are still classified. The bulk of the Clementine images are also still classified - the Navy mapped the entire lunar surface in detail, not just strips here and there.
All that on top of the wholesale disposal of many of the Apollo images during what was billed as a purge of old and unwanted early data to make room for other things.
The only unretouched images to come out of the Lunar exploration programs were the Viking images, which were released before anyone realized there are some odd things showing up. Unfortunately, the resolution is so poor that the “odd things” could be just tricks of light and shadow as claimed - or maybe not. All subsequent missions never rephotographed the same areas at the same height, orbit, and sun angles - at least not publicly. We may never know what, if anything, the “Castle” or the “Tower” really are.
The recently released rescanned Apollo images are copies of copies of copies - the original negatives having been variously lost, degraded in storage, destroyed, or taken as souvenirs by various people in the Lunar programs. Keep in mind that every time a copy of a negative is made, both detail and resolution are degraded and lowered - so what ones sees now is not anyway close to the originals - partricularily given the far lower resolution of web images, even in Tiff format.
Someone once claimed they had an original Hasselblad Apollo negative (taken as a souvenir) which showed far more detail, clarity, and additional subject matter, when compared to the corresponding NASA official image.
There has always been something slightly fishy about what was released.
Thanks for the reply!
My point being that the technology we sent was so good, that anything inconsistent is not tech-related.
A smeared image on one frame, if it was the cameras fault, would most likely be smeared in the next frame... and all later frames taken by the camera.
It’s kinda like when we see pics back from Mars that look like squirrels or rats or lizards.
Seems to me it wouldn’t be hard to just sorta drive over and get a really good close up...
And they keep going on and on and on about water, hell, they proved years ago there is water on Mars, ice at least, and recent finds show there is frozen water.
But if there is something there, they cannot contain it any longer.
Pretty soon, the Maldives or Spain or Sri Lanka will be sending up a lunar probe, and those photos will be on the net.
Or the Chinese will publish photos.
We will see.