The Apollo 15 landing site imaged last Friday night from Melbourne with a Skywatcher 8 inch Newtonian and an ASI224mc planetary cam (stack of 2000 sub-frames with 1.5 drizzle to reduce pixel size). Click for best resolution and legible labels.

The expanded square shows the landing site in more detail.

The annotation is adapted from Google Earth's moon module.

Apollo 15 was a 'J-mission' meaning long-stay on the moon. Mission duration (to/from earth) was 12 days 7 hrs 11 mins 53 secs. Crew were David Scott, Alfred Worden and James Irwin.

It would have been interesting in the landing module steering down onto the edge of the Hadley Rille, just a few hundred metres off intended target, in that narrow space between the St George Hill and Rima Hadley.

The EVA (Extra Vehicular Activity) routes (which of course are only visible from lunar orbiting cameras) are digitised from the Google Earth source. This was the first mission in which a Lunar Roving Vehicle was used and which allowed much longer and further EVA's than were conducted on previous lunar landings. There were 4 EVA's on this mission.

Stand-Up EVA:

The first day on landing the crew stayed in the landing module to synchronise their sleep cycles ahead of a busy routine. Scott however did suit-up, depressurise and opened the docking hatch to photograph the surrounding terrain.

EVA-1: Duration 6 hrs 32 mins 7 secs.

Drive to and from Elbow crater.

EVA-2 Duration 7 hrs 12 mins 14 secs.

Drive to Mount Hadley delta along the Appenine Front. Site of the famed lunar rock ..."Genesis Rock'.

EVA-3 Duration 4 hrs 49 mins 50 secs.

Drive to the edge of Hadley Rille NW of the Landing Module (LM). On returning to the LM, Scott performed his famed hammer/feather drop in honour of Galileo. The feather was fittingly a falcons feather - Falcon being the call sign of the LM.

Google (youtube apollo 15 hammer feather) to see this amazing footage. Scott then drove the rover away from the LM to set up the camera to film the LM ascent. While the camera was turned off, he laid the "Fallen Astronaut" plague and a small (hand-size) aluminium statuette to commemorate 14 known American and Russian astronauts who lost their lives in pursuit of space exploration. Due to secrecy of the Soviet program, it was later learned there were 2 others not listed on the plaque at the time.

The rover travelled around 17.5 miles (combined radial distance) across all 3 EVA's. The crew spent just under 3 days on the lunar surface, of which over 18 hours was on EVA’s outside the LM.

It's great to explore this fascinating history with your own images - to visualise this historic site !