The best place to train for a moon mission is, of course, the moon. That’s obviously not the best environment for a first-time astronaut, so according to these photos released by the Pacific International Space Center for Exploration Systems (PISCES), NASA did the next best thing: They took their training to Hawaii.

Certainly, there are worse ways to prepare for your upcoming trip to the moon.

On Hawaii’s Big Island, the volcanic terrain bears an uncanny resemblance to Earth’s dutiful orbiter – so much so that NASA used it to teach astronauts how to operate equipment like the famous “Moon Buggy,” depicted above.

Astronauts from Apollo missions 13 through 17 trained in Hawaii, and the 50th state is still used today as a training ground for moon and Mars missions. Of course these days, the testing and training is done mostly for robots, not astronauts. The Big Island’s soil is also a good analog for Mars’ surface, so NASA scientists have been testing ways to extract oxygen from the soil.

Rob Kelso, the PISCES executive director, found the images at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. PISCES is in the process of putting the images together to form two murals. Check out more images below: