50 years ago astronauts of mission Apollo 11 have been traveling to the Moon. They were somewhere in the middle of this outstanding journey, and they landed on the Moon on July 20th, 1969 at 20:17:40 UTC. At 17:54:00 UTC next day they lifted off to rejoin Columbia at the orbit. I marked Apollo 11 landing site at the image below. Two hours earlier, when Armstrong and Aldrin have been preparing to start, Luna 15 crashed into the Moon 1200km away. Luna 15 was a second Soviet attempt to return lunar soil back to Earth with a goal to outstrip the US in achieving a sample return in the Moon race.
You can read much more details about this missions at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_15 pages.
In the images below I marked landing site together with Armstrong, Collins and Aldrin craters.
Links to full resolution images:
https://astrojolo.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/2019-07-19-Apollo-11.jpg
https://astrojolo.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Apollo-11-landing-site-2.jpg
I have captured these Moon images six years ago using QHY5 camera and 6″ newtonian with barlow lens and IR pass filter. They are mosaic composed of many smaller frames. As I recall the amount for each image I collected about 40-50GB of data 🙂
Clear skies!
