Portrait of an Eagle

Have you seen this picture from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter?

That little white dot casting the big shadow is the bottom half of the LEM that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed in 40 years ago today. Isn’t that neat? It was taken with this camera from an altitude of about 30 miles.

They’ve released photos of the other Apollo landing sites too. I really like this one of the Apollo 14 landing site.

You can actually see the marks the astronauts left when they were walking around! That was the mission where Alan Shepard hit a couple of golf balls.

The trick to these pictures is that they were taken when the sun was very low in the sky at each landing site. This emphasizes the details.

Go check out all of the pictures at full resolution here.