NASA sent up a spacecraft back in 2004 called MESSENGER to go over to Mercury and study it. It just now is doing its first flyby of Mercury, apparently in order to wind up orbitting Mercury at some point it has to go around the sun and fly by several planets (it has gone by Venus twice now) to slow down enough at the right time and not hurtle itself straight into the sun or crash on Mercury's surface. At least, that is how I'm understanding it.
This picture was from NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day for today, cool huh? If you want to teach your kids about the Moon or if you are as nerdy as I am just to look for yourself, Google Maps has a great website with information about all of the NASA missions to the Moon, including panoramic pictures they took on the surface!
Even cooler yet is the Sky layer on Google Earth, where you can look at tons of pictures all around the universe from Hubble and several other telescopes. They just updated it with more layers of additional telescopes. It has been my new favorite thing to do with my free time the last year, and I easily spend hours looking around and reading about nebulas, quasars, and black holes. It is as good as you can get without being an officer on the USS Enterprise.
I'm really hoping to buy a telescope this tax season that I can take on camping trips with me. The bummer thing about living in Northeast Ohio is that there is WAY too much cloud cover too much of the time. :-(
