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By Jim Bell
Sterling Publishing Co., 2009; 160 pages, $19.95
Rendering the Moon in 3-D might be just a bit of techno-fakery, especially since most lunar missions didn’t carry stereo cameras. But Moon 3-D author Jim Bell, a Cornell University astronomer who leads the imaging team for the Mars rovers, explains that NASA’s archives of lunar photography contain many views of the same landscapes from different angles, which can be computer-processed to create accurate 3-D images. Just look through the red and blue gels of the flip-up viewer mounted on the front cover, and—voila!—craters, mountains, and even the footprints of the astronauts leap from the page.