On March 2, 2025, the lunar lander Blue Ghost successfully touched down on the surface of the Moon! This is the first time a private company’s mission had a fully successful landing (Intuitive Machine’s Odysseus lander was tipped at an unplanned 30° angle after it landed though it was still operational). 

Blue Ghost has quite a few interesting instruments on board that will do a lot of science, and of course it has cameras that can and have taken extraordinary images of the Moon. The mission team took images during the descent and after landing and stitched them together to make this incredible video:

Earth is the glary ball in the black sky over the lunar surface; on average Earth is three or four times as reflective as the Moon so it’s overexposed in the images. I like how the gold foil (used as insulation since gold is an excellent reflector of infrared light) appears to flap a bit as the lander descends; that’s not due to air, since the Moon has none, but just the vibrations from the thruster firing to slow and control the descent.

I also got a kick out of the shots showing those same foil blankets against the gray of the landscape. The Moon has very little color, so it provides an oddly dull-hued background to the vibrant gold.

One thing that’s interesting is the lack of distance perspective in the images. The Moon has craters of all sizes, from millimeters across to over 100 kilometers, and without any sort of familiar landmarks or atmospheric haze to mark distance it’s impossible to judge how high up the lander is. Until the 2:06 mark, that is, when you can see the spacecraft’s shadow on the Moon under Earth in the sky. Those last few moments are amazing as the dusty regolith gets blown around by the thruster exhaust. So cool to see small bits of material falling slowly in the one-sixth gravity, too.

Right now the Moon is at first quarter phase. If you go out and look, you’ll see an oval blue-gray dark patch on the Moon’s upper right portion near the edge. That’s Mare Crisium — the Sea of Crises — and it’s actually a circular basin from an asteroid impact that’s filled with dark basaltic lava (the blue color is due to Earth’s atmosphere, and is not intrinsic to the mare). It’s about 560 km wide. That’s where Blue Ghost landed.

Firefly’s intention is to create a service industry for clients who want to send instrumentation to the Moon, and this is a pretty good start. The nominal mission is for 14 Earth days, or half a lunar day, and should all go well will operate a bit into the night, too.

You can see more images and video on their Flickr page. Congrats to the team at Firefly!

In the early 2000s, and for about a decade, skepticism was becoming A Big Deal. There were big groups with thousands of members holding well-attended conferences, some on an international scale.

The James Randi Educational Foundation (or JREF) was a particularly influential one, a leader in the field. I was invited to come to their conferences early on — they were called TAMs, for The Amazing Meeting; James Randi was a magician who performed under the moniker The Amazing Randi.

The meetings were fun; it’s nice to be a part of an in-group and support each other. Eventually my own star rose in this area, and for a while I was even president of JREF.

For some time, though, I had been a bit uncomfortable with the confrontational style of a lot of skeptics, even as it also struck me as funny to watch (who doesn’t like publicly slamming a charlatan?). But what was becoming more clear to me was how that was growing into the default stance of many skeptics — being rude, argumentative, even belligerent, many times when it wasn’t called for, at least not initially.

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