COMPILATION OF MOONSHOTS TAKEN FROM EARTH AND HUBBLE TELESCOPES, 1999-04-16 (photo)

In a change of venue from peering at the distant universe, NASA's HubbleSpace Telescope has taken a look at Earth's closest neighbor in space, the Moon. Hubble was aimed at one of the Moon's most dramatic and photogenic targets, the 58 mile-wide (93 km) impact crater Copernicus. (Upper left) The Moon is so close to Earth that Hubble would need to take a mosaic of 130 pictures to cover the entire disk. This ground-based picture from the Lick Observatory on Earth shows the area covered in Hubble's photomosaic with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. (Center) Hubble's crisp bird's-eye view clearly shows the ray pattern of bright dust ejected out of the crater over one billion years ago, when an asteroid larger than a mile across slammed into the Moon. Hubble can resolve features as small as 600 feet across in the terraced walls of the crater, and the hummock-like blanket of material blasted out by the meteor impact. (Lower right) A close-up view of Copernicus' terraced walls.