Another device, the mapping camera, rose out of the SIM bay on rails. I used it to snap precisely measured images of smaller patches of terrain. Using a star-seeking camera and a laser beam that bounced off the surface, I could match every photo with the exact angle and distance from the landscape. Shooting stripes of overlapping photos, I mapped the moon as explorers of old had mapped the earth. As my orbit shifted slightly westward with every revolution, I mapped a new area on each pass.
I kept on a precise, intensely busy schedule to open and close lenses and shutters, deploy and retract booms, and orient the spacecraft. But there was more. I would also take scientifically valuable photos myself out of the windows.
The moon looked enormous from such a low orbit. From Earth, I’d had no sense of its vertical features. Now as I zipped across the landscape I saw the outer rings of molten waves formed by meteor impacts frozen into gunmetal-gray mountains that reached fifteen thousand feet up toward me. I glimpsed tall central peaks of craters before I saw the surrounding low rims. As I constantly rounded a curved and angled surface, the tops of these hills would peek out over the horizon before I reached them, and once I passed over them the landscape would plunge thousands of feet in steep, shadowed crater walls. With no atmosphere to soften the view, every crater and boulder was sharp and crisp.
It was an alien world, but nevertheless it felt oddly familiar. Thanks to Farouk, every time I slid back into sunlight I recognized features right away. Craters, rilles, and overlapping, intermingling lava flows marched past that I knew from my training. I felt strangely comfortable—I knew this place.
I wanted to see if I could spot Dave and Jim on the surface with my own eyes. I was not just curious: knowing their exact position would also help us dock three days later. Finding such a tiny object amid a plain of craters was not easy, but as I gazed through the sextant I caught a quick glint from Falcon’s shiny skin, then spotted their long shadow. “I’ve got the LM!” I announced to mission control. “He’s sitting right by a very small crater.” I rattled off their exact coordinates. “I hope the view is as fantastic down there as it is up here,” I radioed down to Dave.
“I’m telling you, it really is!” Dave assured me. “We’ll do the little things and you do the big things,” he added, as I studied the grand sweep of the landing region from above.
“I think we’re going to give lots of people lots of things to do for a while,” I told mission control. The three of us would be returning massive amounts of data to analyze.
Changes in color and shading fascinated me as I circled the moon. Looking toward the sun, the lunar surface appeared light brown. Away from the sun, it looked gray. I saw white splashes where fresher craters had blown out flour-like rays of powdery soil. Although I know this could not be possible, the bright rays often appeared to be suspended above the surface in a lacelike haze, not scattered across the mountains. The moon looked bleached and desert-like when the sun was directly overhead, as if clay had been mixed with sand. Then, as the sun lowered, evidence of long-ago violent events would appear in the lengthening shadows of old scars and wounds from impacts. I could see lava flows so thick that they must have crept across the surface in a slow, widening, sticky wave, filling old craters as they wound across the moon. It was like a jigsaw puzzle of features, each with its own secrets for me to piece together.
With no atmosphere, the line between day and night was strikingly distinct. Mountains cast long slashes of blackness across the landscape, and features stood out as if I had placed a flashlight against a rough stucco wall. I was fascinated by the starkness of the peaks. I loved to take photos in these shadowy regions—and not only because it helped the scientists. Back on Earth, they could use the shadows to measure the height of lunar features. But there was also a drama and beauty in these locations, and I concentrated much of my photography there.
Streaks of light would create alternating light and shadowy waves that once again stretched and seemed to billow and flutter as I curved into blackness. I felt like a sailor crossing a dark ocean. I knew photos could never capture what I observed. Neither can these words.
Once in darkness, I tried to take low-light-level photos of astronomical objects. With the moon cutting off light from the sun and Earth, the blackness was total. I would put my camera in the window and try for a ten-second exposure, using very fast film. It was tough to hold the spacecraft steady. I spent a lot of time working to keep Endeavour motionless, but in the end I decided it was impossible for more than a few seconds at a time. The spacecraft just wasn’t that delicate to maneuver. But I still took some great photos.
Endeavour had one window with no ultraviolet shielding or any other protection. Made of quartz, it was absolutely clear. I’d been warned never to look out of that window without sunglasses or be caught in a direct sunbeam. It could have ruined my eyes and burned my skin. But that window was invaluable for photos when Endeavour was in complete darkness.
As I would be the first person to fly over the Aristarchus crater, scientists had asked me to study it closely. Astronomers thought they had seen reddish glows there, suggesting the crater was volcanically active. It was such a pale, smooth, almost mirror-like crater that even in shadow it looked as if it was gleaming in sunlight. “Looking at Aristarchus, a little bit in awe,” I later told Karl.
I didn’t see any glowing, but other instruments picked up possible traces of seeping radioactive gases. Something interesting was going on there. I hoped my measurements would help scientists puzzle it out.
Most of my observations grew out of my extensive training with Farouk. But the perception of human eyes allowed me to note subtle differences from Farouk’s photos and theories almost right away. For example, as I flew over the immense Tsiolkovsky crater, I saw that the enormous central peak was a little higher and the outside rim better defined than we had imagined. In photos, the smooth, lava-filled crater floor looked darker than its surroundings, but with my own eyes I could see that it was different only in texture, not color.
The crater was so vast that when I crossed it I could see little else. The central peak rose like a Swiss alp, a towering pale slab of rock surrounded by boulders hundreds of feet wide. Gazing closely, I could see details of rock layers no camera had ever captured. It looked like something had smashed into the moon eons ago like a stone into a pond, leaving a rippled crater, a smooth basin of lava, and a central peak rebounding out of the lunar depths. It reminded me of a bright island rising from dark, smooth waters.
Gliding over Picard crater, I could see delicate layers of lava, like rings on a bathtub, all the way down the crater walls to the bottom. They alternated between thin light and dark bands. This beautiful effect was hard to capture on camera, but I could observe with my eyes and describe it in detail.
The moon was overwhelmingly majestic, yet stark and mostly devoid of color. Every orbit, however, I was treated to the sight of the distant Earth rising over the lunar horizon.
In my entire six days circling the moon, no matter what I was doing, I stopped to look at the Earth rise. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen or imagined.