With the aid of a moderate-size telescope and a little imagination, you can revisit the Apollo landing sites, where humans first explored the surface of another world. While you can't see any of the hardware left on the Moon (seeing one of the lunar rovers from Earth would be like trying to see a grain of sand on a beach while flying high overhead in a jet airliner!), you can identify some of the craters, mountains, and other geological features near the landing sites. Most of the images you will see while exploring this page were taken from lunar orbit and are much clearer than Earthbound views, but many of the features you will see are visible in a backyard telescope with good seeing.
Below is a picture of the full Moon taken with a telescope here on Earth. Click on the site you want to explore and the page will guide you through a series of images, taking you closer and closer to each of the landing sites. (The top image on each page will contain a yellow outlined box showing the destination for the next image; below the large image will be a small version of the image from the previous page, with the location of the current image outlined in blue. Click here for a guide to navigating the pages.) Just keep clicking on each successive image and you will continue to zoom on in to the landing site you've chosen.
The first two images in each sequence will be from Earth-based photos. This will give you an idea of what you might expect to see as you explore the Moon with your own telescope. Then a series of images taken by the un-manned Lunar Orbiter spacecraft and pictures taken from the Command Module during the Apollo missions themselves will zoom in to show you the landing site in detail.
Have fun exploring the Moon!
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Dr. David Kring (Director) and Maria Schuchardt (Data Manager) of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory's Space Imagery Center, for making available the Center's vast collection of lunar images and for their help in preparing the images used on this site.
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