USGS Astro Hot Topics: Historic Lunar Images Revived: "Historic space images taken by NASA's Lunar Orbiters in the 1960s are now available in digital form on the internet. Thanks to modern scanning technology and processing methods developed by the USGS, these important images can now be viewed by everyone at a NASA-funded web site established by the USGS Astrogeology Program in Flagstaff, Arizona where mapping of planets continues to be a primary function.
A series of five NASA missions orbited the Moon in 1966 and 1967 to photograph the Moon and assist the Apollo Program in finding safe places for humans to land. As photographic prints, these images have long been available to lunar scientists and they were invaluable in planning and understanding the Apollo mission science data. Now these same photos are available to the general public on the internet.
Since Apollo, several other spacecraft (including Galileo, Clementine and Lunar Prospector) have returned global color image data but the Lunar Orbiter data are still the starting point for scientific studies that require regional views of the Moon.
To view the images, go to: http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/Projects/LunarOrbiterDigitization/. "