The Apollo 17 Drive Route

When looking through a telescope it’s hard to get a sense of human-scale distances. Saturn and Jupiter are enormous, but they look tiny through a telescope. Nebula are light years across but they easily fit in a photo, our brains simply can’t comprehend the sense of scale for some of these objects.

Last night I decided at the last minute to take a photo of the Moon before clouds rolled in. I’ve photographed the Apollo 11 site before, but this time I decided to look for the final mission to the Moon, Apollo 17. Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmidt spent 75 hours on the Moon, and as of right now they are the last humans to visit our neighbor. Hopefully in the next few years that will change, and we’ll get to add some women to the list of moon walkers. It’s surprisingly easy to find their landing location, but I did my best to zoom in as much as possible.

The high zoom makes the image a bit grainy, but at this scale we can see the extent to which the lunar rover drove! Apollo 17 drove just about 36km, some to the northeast of Camelot (the landing site) and some to the west. The whole extent of the driving covers roughly 12km, which amazingly spans more than a single pixel in an image taken through my telescope!

The rover drive route isn’t super obvious or large on this image, but for once human activity in space isn’t reduced to a single pixel! I may try this image again on a clearer night, but I’m very pleased with how this came out. I took about 2000 frames of video hand tracking this location, then stacked the best 75% in autostakkert, and sharpened with wavelets in Registax. Some level adjustments were made, as well as some filtering in GIMP.