Apollo Landing Sites, with Shadows

LROC, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, will have a number of opportunities to photograph the Apollo landing sites. Despite the excellent half-meter resolution of LROC's narrow angle cameras, the LM descent stage at each site can fill only a few pixels of these images. If photographed when the Sun is low in the lunar sky, however, the long shadow formed by the descent stage is easily discernable.

This brief animation shows the locations of the Apollo landing sites, with lengthening shadows as each site approaches lunar nightfall. The lighting simulates the angle of the Sun during the second week of July, 2009, when LROC took its first images of the sites. The gold LM markers are about 20,000 times actual size.