Moonrise over Bend

Two days ago, the October harvest moon sparkled over Bend and Central Oregon, and for that matter, all around the world. These are some photos I took while the moon was rising over Powell Butte. The St Mary's chapel cross provided a hauntingly beautiful and spiritual foreground for the moon, which in the first photo you can see with extreme clarity, including all the craters and intriguing topography. (feel free to click and enlarge)

The Moon is thought to have formed nearly 4.5 billion years ago, not long after earth. The Moon is the only celestial body, other than Earth on which humans have currently have set foot. The Soviet Union's Luna program was the first to reach the Moon with unmanned spacecraft in 1959; the United States' NASA Apollo program achieved the only manned missions to date, with six manned lunar landings between 1969 and 1972, with the first being Apollo11. The average distance to the Moon from earth is 384,403 km (238,857 miles).