315 a
Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, or Michael Collins

Lunar Sunrise over the Sea of Nectar during the first orbit

Apollo 11, July 16-24, 1969, orbit 1, 076:42:11 GET

Vintage gelatin silver print on fiber-based paper, 20.3 x 25.4cm (8 x 10in), with NASA MSC caption on the verso, numbered “NASA AS11-42-6237” in black in top margin

315 b
Taken by the TV camera inside the spacecraft Columbia

Crater Langrenus in the Sea of Fertility

Apollo 11, July 16-24, 1969, orbit 2, 078:43:20 GET

Vintage chromogenic print on fiber-based Kodak paper, 20.3 x 25.4cm (8 x 10in), with NASA MSC caption and “A Kodak Paper” watermarks on the verso, numbered “NASA S-69-39409” in red in top margin

315 c
Michael Collins

Bright-ray crater on the lunar farside

Apollo 11, July 16-24, 1969, orbit 3

Vintage gelatin silver print on fiber-based paper, 19.1 x 19.3cm, margins trimmed close to image, NASA MSC caption numbered “AS11-42-6285” on the verso
20.3 x 25.4cm (8 x 10in)

315 a
Paris, Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, La Lune: Du Voyage Réel aux Voyages Imaginaires, April-July 2019; exhibition catalogue, p. 21, no. 8, illustrated.

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Lot Essay

315 a
This oblique view taken looking south with the 80mm lens and B&W magazine 42/U shows the lunar nearside’s terminator (boundary between day and night on the Moon).
The rising Sun illuminates the wall of the large 100-km Crater Theophilus, located at the northwest edge of the Sea of Nectar. The smooth area is the Sea of Nectar. The smaller 28-km Crater Madler is located to the east (left) of Theophilus. Visible in the background are the large Crater Fracastorius and the smaller Crater Beaumont. The LM rendezvous radar antenna is in the right foreground (seen from the CSM Columbia docked to the LM Eagle).

Soon after this photograph was taken, the spacecraft entered in the shadow of the Moon, just over the Tranquillity Base landing site located to the north west of Theophilus and not yet illuminated by the rising Sun.

Latitude / longitude: 13 S / 28. 5E.

“The Moon I have known all my life, that two-dimensional small yellow disk in the sky, has gone away somewhere, to be replaced by the most awesome sphere I have ever seen. To begin with it is huge, completely filling our window. Second, it is three-dimensional. The belly of it bulges out toward us in such a pronounced fashion that I almost feel I can reach out and touch it. To add to the dramatic effect, we can see the stars again. We are in the shadow of the Moon
now, and the elusive stars have reappeared,” wrote Michael Collins (NASA SP-350, p. 207).

076:42:11 Armstrong: At the terminator it’s ashen gray. As you get further away from the terminator, it gets to be a lighter gray, and as you get closer to the subsolar point, you can definitely see browns and tans on the ground, according to the last Apollo limb observation anyway.
076:42:49 McCandless (Mission Control): Roger, 11. We’re recording your comments for posterity. [...]
076:43:19 Armstrong: And the landing site is well into the dark here. I don’t think we’re going to be able to see anything of the landing site this early.

315 b
A still from the first Apollo 11 TV transmission from lunar orbit.

078:43:20 Aldrin: We’re moving the camera over to the right window now to give you Langrenus, its - its several central peaks and...
078:43:29 McCandless (Mission Control): Roger. We got Langrenus in our screen now. Langrenus (132 km) is a large and quite spectacular crater on the southwest margin of Mare Fecunditatis, Among its major features are a heavily terraced rim and central peaks up to 1-km tall.
078:43:54 McCandless: Okay, 11. This is Houston. We’re getting a beautiful picture of Langrenus now with its rather conspicuous central peak.
078:44:07 Collins: The Sea of Fertility doesn’t look very fertile to me. I don’t know who named it.
078:44:12 Armstrong: Well, it may have been named by a gentleman whom this crater was named after, Langrenus. Langrenus was a cartographer to the King of Spain and made one of the - one of the early reasonably accurate maps of the Moon.
078:44:39 McCandless: Roger. That’s very interesting...
078:44:41 Collins: I’ll have to admit it sounds better for our purposes than the Sea of Crises.
078:44:46 McCandless: Amen to that.

315 c
A very rare frame (shot with the 250mm telephoto lens) from the B&W magazine 42/U used only in the Command Module while in lunar orbit.
The small fresh rayed crater is between Craters Saenger and Erro, just east of Smyth’s Sea. Latitude / longitude: 4.5° N / 101° E.