All the landing sites lie on the near side of the Moon and were chosen to explore different geologic terrains. Astronauts bagged pounds kg of Moon rocks, which represented everything from mare basalts to ancient highland rocks to impact-shattered rocks called breccias. Apollo 12 astronauts even found the first meteorite ever discovered on another world, the Bench Crater carbonaceous chondrite.
With the Moon waxing this week and next, the advancing line of lunar sunrise will expose one site after another beginning with Apollo 17 in the Moon's eastern hemisphere and finishing with Apollos 12 and 14 in the western.
But the larger the scope and higher the power, the closer you'll be able to pinpoint each landing site and better able to visualize the scene. Below are the approximate times and current dates after New Moon when each Apollo landing site first becomes fully illuminated by the Sun:. The base images for all the sites are photographs taken by the LRO.
Click the "paper stack" icon and uncheck Sunlit Region to see a fully-illuminated Moon, no matter the current phase. Checking the Nomenclature box will bring up the names of craters, rills and many other features.
More details about each of the LRO Apollo photos can be found here. Following are maps for pinpointing each Apollo landing site. South is up, and clicking on the images will link you to higher resolution versions. Time to strap on your boots and follow in the footsteps of the first people to walk on the Moon.
By: Bob King November 10, By: Camille M. Carlisle November 9, By: Jennifer Willis November 8, By: Alan MacRobert November 5, Astronomy in Space with David Dickinson. By: David Dickinson November 4, Sky Tour Astronomy Podcast. They came closer to the Moon than any previous crewed mission, and paved the way for the actual moon landing which took place with Apollo 11 in July of Some of the greatest, most eye-opening photos, stories and quotes came back from those trips, including some from Apollo 8's Bill Anders, who took the famous "Earthrise" photos illustrated above.
Anders described the journey to the Moon as follows:. You could see the flames and the outer skin of the spacecraft glowing; and burning, baseball-size chunks flying off behind us. It was an eerie feeling, like being a gnat inside a blowtorch flame. Some of the deployed scientific equipment taken to the Moon during the Apollo 12 mission, where the Scientific equipment we've installed on the Moon. Did you know that we brought up a large amount of scientific equipment and installed it on the lunar surface during the Apollo missions?
And many others. That we have the data from these experiments, and that the lunar retroreflectors are still in use today, represent some pretty strong evidence that we did, in fact, land on the Moon.
This image, from January 31, , shows sunrise from Alan Shepard's 12 o'clock pan taken near the Without the Sun glare, we can see some detail on the Cone-Crater ridge. We brought back samples, and learned a ton about lunar geology from them. The final two astronauts to ever walk on the Moon, Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt, ran into quite a surprise when they did. Schmitt, the lone civilian-astronaut and only scientist to travel to the Moon, was often described as the most business-like of all the astronauts.
Which is why it must have been such a shock to hear him exclaim the following:. The orange soil, at the lower right of the image, really stands out when compared to the colorations Apollo 17, perhaps because they had a geoscientist as one of their moonwalkers, was able to spot this geological oddity that taught us so much about the Moon's origin and composition.
Like any good scientist, or any good explorer, for that matter, Cernan and Schmitt took pictures, collected data, and brought samples back to Earth for further analysis. What could cause orange soil on the Moon, perhaps the most featureless of all the large, airless rocks in our Solar System? What the analysis back on Earth revealed was fantastic: this was volcanic glass. What occurred was that molten lava from the interior of the Moon erupted, some 3 to 4 billion years ago, up above the airless surface and into the vacuum of space.
As the lava became exposed to the vacuum, it separated out into tiny fragments and froze, forming tiny beads of volcanic glass in orange and black colors. The tin in some of the fragments is what gives the orange color. Olivine inclusions found in lunar samples have a spectacularly high water concentration of 1, This is remarkable, because it's the same exact concentration as the water found in terrestrial Earth-based olivine inclusions, pointing to a common origin for the Earth and the Moon.
In , reanalysis of those samples found evidence that water was included in the volcanic eruption: with concentrations of water in the glass beads that were formed 50 times as great as the expected dryness of the Moon.
Olivine inclusions showed water present in concentrations up to 1, parts-per-million. Most remarkably, the lunar samples we've found have indicated that Earth and the Moon have a common origin, consistent with a giant impact that occurred only a few tens of millions of years into the birth of our Solar System.
Without direct samples, obtained by the Apollo missions and brought back to Earth, we never would have been able to draw such a startling, but spectacular, conclusion. A fillet-soil sample was taken close to the boulder, allowing for study of the type and rate of erosion acting on lunar rocks. There are many different lines of evidence that point to humanity's presence on the Moon.
We landed there and can see the evidence, directly, when we look with the appropriate resolution. We have extraordinary amounts of evidence, ranging from eyewitness testimony to the data record tracking the missions to photographs documenting the trips, all supporting the fact that we landed and walked on the lunar surface. It was a time when enormous rockets, gleaming white, thundered into the sky, roaring like dragons, carrying brave explorers across the gulf of space, traveling much further than we could possibly go today.
Between and , six Apollo missions took teams of three astronauts across over miles kilometers of space to the moon, set two of them down on its surface, and brought them all home safely again. A seventh mission, Apollo 13 , famously failed to land on the moon, but the astronauts survived a flight around the moon.
Today, those daring missions are as fascinating as ever. Many people have asked why astronomers don't turn the Hubble Space Telescope towards the moon to take photos of the Apollo spacecraft. But not even the Hubble could see a four-meter wide Apollo spacecraft on the moon. Hubble is essentially a light bucket, designed to collect the faint, ghostly light of faraway galaxies , nebulas and planets. It can't zoom in on things in its own backyard. If you know a youngster who can't get enough of the moon, then they'll be delighted with views through the Orion GoScope II.
Revealing craters and seas up close, this little telescope comes with a carry case and moon map. This article is brought to you by All About Space. All About Space magazine takes you on an awe-inspiring journey through our solar system and beyond, from the amazing technology and spacecraft that enables humanity to venture into orbit, to the complexities of space science.
To see Apollo hardware, you have to go to the moon, and then either land next to the actual spacecraft, as the rovers might do later this year or next, or look down on them from orbit. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter LRO , has done just that, and has taken amazing images of the Apollo landing sites from orbit showing not just the spacecraft themselves, but the lunar rovers parked where they were left, and even the trails of bootprints left in the lunar dust by the explorers.
So, if you were hoping to see Apollo hardware on the moon through your telescope, you've no chance, sadly. However, you can see the Apollo landing sites if your telescope is good enough—and we're going to tell you how, and where, to find them. Best telescopes for beginners, moon and planets. What you can see in this month's night sky. How to Observe the Moon with a Telescope.
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