This year, thousands of people have celebrated the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing on 20 July 1969. What better way to commemorate the event than to pay a visit to Tranquility Base!
The Moon is a wonderful target for observation, but let me state upfront that no telescope on Earth can resolve any equipment left on the moon. To put it in perspective, the resolution limit of my telescope translates to about 800m on the Moon (assuming perfect atmospheric conditions). Compare this to the roughly 4.5m width of the Apollo Lunar Module! Hence, finding Tranquility Base involves identifying nearby lunar features.
Finding the Base
On the day of the anniversary, the phase of the moon was ideal for finding Tranquility Base. This is because the low angle of the Sun casts longer shadows and makes it easier to identify lunar features. I pointed the telescope at the moon and took a few minutes to find the Apollo 11 landing site area. Seeing wasn’t that good and the resulting image was not as sharp as it could be.
Tranquility Base is located on the southern end of the Sea of Tranquility (Mare Tranquillitatis). The dark lava of this “sea” spans 700km and can easily be observed with the naked eye. The area around Tranquility Base, however, requires a telescope to explore.
The pair of 30-31km diameter craters Ritter and Sabine were prominent landmarks. Halfway between Sabine and Maskelyne is a small crater named Armstrong. Armstrong, Collins (crater barely visible in the image), and Aldrin are named after the crew of Apollo 11. There are three more craters south of Aldrin and Collins that signpost the way to Tranquility Base. These craters are about the same size as the 3km diameter Collins. However, due to the resolution limit of my telescope and the poor seeing that night, they were not visible in the image.
The location of Tranquility Base as marked on the image is estimated from the positions of the larger craters.
The Lord’s Supper on the Moon
One of the lesser known facts about the moon was that Buzz Aldrin partook of the Lord’s Supper on the Moon.
After Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon, they had to wait several hours before proceeding down to the surface of the Moon. During this enforced pause, Aldrin took Communion.
Aldrin was an elder at Webster Presbyterian Church and he had sought special permission to bring the elements – wine and bread – on the the mission. The wine and bread would be the first foods ever poured or eaten on the moon. “I poured the wine into the chalice our church had given me. In the one-sixth gravity of the moon the wine curled slowly and gracefully up the side of the cup,” Aldrin would later write. Then, he read some scripture and ate. Armstrong looked on but did not participate.
Perhaps one of the reasons why this event was low-key and not well publicized was because NASA had been sued a few months earlier by an activist who objected to the Apollo 8 astronauts reading the Book of Genesis. The astronauts read the passage on a Christmas Eve broadcast as they became the first humans to orbit the moon. In 2018, NASA published the below video of the broadcast.
Reflections
Aldrin later reflected (in his 2010 memoir) about whether he had done the right thing. “We had come to space in the name of all mankind—be they Christians, Jews, Muslims, animists, agnostics, or atheists,” he wrote. “But at the time I could think of no better way to acknowledge the Apollo 11 experience than by giving thanks to God.”
His thoughts reflect the constant challenge we face as we live our Christian beliefs in the marketplace. May we stand firm in our convictions, but also remain sensitive to our neighbors, whom we are instructed to love as ourselves.