Another "Moon Day" on the Web

Today marks the 36th anniversary of Neil Armstrong setting foot on the lunar surface for the first time.

Coincidentally, early tomorrow morning will mark the full moon. And this Moon Day we also have some sad news to report: James Doohan, who played the highly-flappable Chief Engineer Scotty of the starship Enterprise, passed away today at age 85. Here are several techie ways you can celebrate "moon day" at your PC.

NASA's Moon Image Gallery is a good place to start your virtual tour of the moon, with archived images and multimedia Flash animations about the Apollo missions.

The US Naval Observatory's Live Moon Page updates several times a day to show you an astronomical photograph of exactly what the moon looks like.

If you can't wait that long, check out Fourmilab's Moon Viewer which can show you a computer-generated view of the moon from the Earth, from the Sun, or (if you're curious) a view of the dark side of the moon.

And for true interactivity, check out Google's Google Moon map, which shows the landing spots of the six Apollo missions that made it to the lunar surface and back to Earth, using imagery data provided by NASA. Unfortunately, the NASA images don't provide enough detail to zoom in fully, so Google has had to improvise with the close-up details.

In its typical silliness, Google claims it plans to integrate lunar Local Search capability into the engine, so you'll be able to find the locations and hours of lunar-based businesses. We'll have to wait until 2069 to find out if they're just making pie-in-the-sky promises.

Know any other good lunar Web sites, software, or games? Post your favorites below!