Ever read H.G. Wells' The First Men in the Moon?

Ever since Multimap arrived on the Internet, with its ability to switch into grainy aerial photos, looking at familiar things from the unfamiliar perspective of directly above has become startlingly popular. Google jumped on the bandwagon nice and early, and drove it relentlessly forwards with Google Earth and Google Maps. (Which included images of the Moon, for some reason.)

Microsoft, in a burst of originality (by which they seem to mean "let's do what Google are doing right now, but do it with a slightly shinier interface and with less cross-platform compatibility"), came up with a similar offering, Microsoft Virtual Earth. Presumably this was so-named because it was "virtually" their idea. Anyway, this means that the online map and image service is booming, so it wasn't really surprising that eventually the same obsession was going to capitalise on Google's moon photos and go off-planet.

All of which brings us neatly to today's NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day. The APOD is usually a visual feast anyway - this one is quite a good example, but this famous one is even better, not to mention this one. Today's offering, however, rather than being beautiful, is a little scary.

Obviously, we know that there's nothing down there. Yeah, it's a huge dark hole with immensely sharp edges that reveal the crust at that point to be so thin you could nearly put your finger through it, and you can't see what might be hiding just below the surface because it's dark, so dark, so incredibly dark that anything might be lurking down there, it might be about to creep out of the hole and we'd never know what was there, never, right up until the potential future missions to Mars go ahead, and our astronauts may be sitting in their spacecraft, congratulating each other as it touches down, and never have any idea of the horrors that lie just beneath their feet, ready to take them down, down into the dark silent hellish interior of that frozen, barren planet...

Hmm? Oh, sorry, I got sidetracked for a moment there. Nice picture, though, isn't it?