Postcards from the moon

On the eve of the Lunar New Year, these stunning photos are the first images taken from the surface of the moon in almost four decades. And they were taken by China’s lunar lander Chang’e 3 and its rover Yutu, or Jade Rabbit, which touched down on the moon in December 2013. The China National Space Administration released thousands of the mission’s photos last year to an unwieldy, Chinese-language website. But they did not attract much attention until the Planetary Society’s Emily Lakdawalla went through the trove of images and placed them in an easily downloadable, searchable format.