I always make the mistake when on vacation of taking too many pictures of scenery and not enough pictures of people. Years down the road, the most interesting photos are not landscapes, but the ones that we can look at and say “I remember when we did that!”. And that’s why I think it’s great that we now have cameras around the Moon and Mars that can do the same. LROC at the moon has been able to take some spectacular photos of the Apollo landing sites, including a new one shown below. HiRISE at Mars has been able to take photos of the Mars rovers, Viking landers, and more recently the Phoenix lander.

Phoenix went silent as northern Martian winter crept in, covering it with CO2 frost, but the latest HiRISE image, taken in the spring, shows an ice-free Phoenix! It probably won’t wake up again, but it’s good to see our lander again. The spring images are somewhat grainy because the sun had just peeked above the horizon and light levels were very low. Emily Lakdawalla has a post with more information about this and other HiRISE images of Phoenix.

Credit: NASA / JPL / UA / animation by Emily Lakdawalla

If it’s fun to see our robots again, it’s even cooler to see evidence of humans landing on the moon. Now that LRO is in its final orbit around the moon, it is returning some really excellent photos of the Apollo landing sites, including this new one of the Apollo 17 site. You can even see the flag! For more information and closer views, check out the LROC site.

This high-resolution view of the Apollo 17 landing site shows details as small as the flag! Click to go to the LROC site for higher-resolution versions.