Apollo Landing Sites, with Shadows

The six Apollo lunar landing sites are all relatively near the equator on the side of the Moon that faces the Earth. Left behind at each site is the lower half of the Lunar Module, called the descent stage. It carried most of the astronauts' supplies and served as the launchpad for their return trip to the Command and Service Module in orbit around the Moon.

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.