Page 143 - Lunacy and the Age of Deception

Shadows were one of the first things Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong mentioned when he stepped
onto the surface of the moon. "It's quite dark here in the shadow [of the lunar module] and a little
hard for me to see that I have good footing," he radioed to Earth...

Above: Blinding sunshine, dark shadows and the lunar lander Antares. From the book FULL MOON
by Michael Light, Alfred A. Knopf ©1999.

Given plenty of time to adapt, an astronaut could see almost anywhere.
(Author’s Note: Cameras, unlike people, don’t have plenty of time to adapt.)

Almost. Consider the experience of Apollo 14 astronauts Al Shepard and Ed Mitchell:

They had just landed at Fra Mauro and were busily unloading the lunar module. Out came the
ALSEP, a group of experiments bolted to a pallet. Items on the pallet were held down by "Boyd
bolts," each bolt recessed in a sleeve used to guide the Universal Handling Tool, a sort of
astronaut's wrench. Shepard would insert the tool and give it a twist to release the bolt--simple,
except that the sleeves quickly filled with moondust. The tool wouldn't go all the way in.

The sleeve made its own little shadow, so "Al was looking at it, trying to see inside. And he couldn't
get the tool in and couldn't get it released--and he couldn't see it," recalls Mitchell.

"Remember," adds Mitchell, "on the lunar surface there's no air to refract light--so unless you've
got direct sunlight, there's no way in hell you can see anything. It was just pitch black. That's an
amazing phenomenon on an airless planet..."

Shadows could also be mischievous:

Apollo 12 astronauts Pete Conrad and Al Bean landed in the Ocean of Storms only about 600 yards
from Surveyor 3, a robotic spacecraft sent by NASA to the moon three years earlier. A key goal of
the Apollo 12 mission was to visit Surveyor 3, to retrieve its TV camera, and to see how well the
craft had endured the harsh lunar environment. Surveyor 3 sat in a shallow crater where Conrad
and Bean could easily get at it--or so mission planners thought.

The astronauts could see Surveyor 3 from their lunar module Intrepid. "I remember the first time