The Japanese Selene spacecraft is now in orbit around the Moon and has sent back some high definition tv recordings. You can watch a bit of that video – it really is like being on board and looking out the window.

Wow.

The video consists of 8 minutes of footage, shot from 100 kilometres up (on Halloween, incidentally), and squashed into 1 minute for your viewing pleasure, says Asia’s tech news source Tech-On. The Japanese Space Agency notes it has no audio, a bit apologetically – but what audio would there be in a vacuum exactly? The whooshing of air past the microphones?

Funny, isn’t it, that Japan’s craft takes ace high-tech video footage, and Europe’s recent lunar mission just took stills? Well, we all know where to go when buying a video camera…

And oh, how things have changed: here’s the television footage that people got to see when the Apollo missions landed back in the 70s. Not nearly so whizzy, that.

PS: Not to be left out of the new lunar rush, German politicians are making noises again about their own Moon project… if they can find the money (Reuters). They’ve been talking about that a while; Der Spiegel has a piece on those plans from earlier this year. “Sheesh… it seems EVERYONE wants to get to the moon nowadays” says aviation website Aero-news.