Are there any photographs of mountains without significant erosion (on Earth or otherwise) I'm curious about how mountains on an airless world such as the Moon would look if you were standing on the surface and looking at them. There are plenty of artists' impressions, of course, but I'm curious about whether there are any existing photographs of such a scene.

From browsing photographs of the Moon landings, there are a few surprisingly rounded-looking low hills on the horizon, but not what you'd call an actual mountain. This makes sense, since the missions targeted large flat areas where it would be safe to land. There are photographs of mountains seen from Lunar orbit, but not from the surface.

There are photographs of Mount Sharp from the Curiosity mission to Mars, but Mars has an atmosphere, and to my untrained eye Mount Sharp looks quite eroded.

So I'm wondering whether there are any such photos in existence at all - either because a probe has landed on an airless body close enough to a mountain to get a picture, or because a camera in orbit has been aimed at the horizon in order to capture a mountain range from the same angle at which it would be seen from the surface. 

Alternatively, are there any mountains on Earth where (for whatever reason) erosion hasn't played a big role in shaping them so far, and which therefore look similar to the uneroded mountains one would find on an airless world?
Here's how astronomers of the late 19th century thought the Moon would appear:


Recreations in Astronomy by H. D. Warren D. D., published in 1879, via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selenography.

Here's what Apollo 15 astronauts saw:




  Apollo 15 Lunar Module Falcon at the Hadley-Apennine landing site. Hadley Delta in the background rises approximately 4,000 meters (about 13,124 feet) above the plain. The base of the mountain is approximately 5 kilometers (about 3 statute miles) away.


Source: NASA, from Four Out of Six Apollos.

Below is a photograph of the even taller Mons Hadley, 1.1 km taller than Hadley Delta shown above:


Source: NASA, photograph as15-86-11603, from Apollo Imagery. 

Compare the above with mountains on the Earth. Here's a picture of Mont Blanc, a mountain here on the Earth comparable in size to  the smaller of the two lunar mountains portrayed above:


Photograph by Zoharby, taken from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.




  Alternatively, are there any mountains on Earth where (for whatever reason) erosion hasn't played a big role in shaping them so far, and which therefore look similar to the uneroded mountains one would find on an airless world?


Nathaniel, you have a mistaken view of erosion. Erosion eventually does tear the tallest mountains down to tiny little hills. However, erosion also makes those tall mountains very jagged at first. Erosion is the primary reason why Mont Blanc and other new, tall mountains are so jagged. Liquid water seeps into cracks in the rocks and then freezes into ice. Ice has a lower density than water. This means that liquid water expands upon freezing. That expansion breaks the rock that form mountains into jagged edges.

Another reason our mountains are jagged is plate tectonics. The Earth is the only body in the solar system that exhibits plate tectonics. New continental crust forms largely from older continental crust. Erosion eventually brings particles torn from mountains to a flat area or river delta, where they collect. The material brought to those collection areas changes over time. The end result: Strata (layered rock formations). The different strata in rock have different strengths and weaknesses and thus erode differently. That differential erosion results in jagged mountains.


Bottom line: You don't see jagged mountains on the Moon or Mars because they don't have water in all three phases and because they don't have plate tectonics.