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A small treat for the weekend.

In the late evening of 24 April 1972, Apollo 16 left lunar orbit carrying John Young, Thomas Mattingley II, & Charlie Duke back to Earth.

The Apollo Metric (Mapping) Camera took a sequence of still images looking back at the Moon, initially the lunar farside & then the nearside as it rotated into view.

Here's a 10 fps movie sequence showing 90 of those images without any processing or alignment.

Credit: NASA/JSC/Arizona State University

#SpaceExploration

A sequence of images taken of the Moon during the departure of Apollo 16 in 1972.
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FWIW, I deleted a couple of images from the sequence because they were likely badly scanned (or maybe something happened on the camera side). So there are a couple of hiccups, but it’s jerky enough that you probably don’t notice the gaps.