Animation, Editing

The only visual record of the historic Apollo 11 landing is from a 16mm time-lapse movie camera mounted in Buzz Aldrin’s window. Due to the LM windows’ size and the angle at which the movie camera was mounted, what Neil Armstrong saw as he flew and landed the LM was not recorded. The LROC team reconstructed the last three minutes of the landing using landmark navigation and altitude call outs from the voice recording.

To accomplish this, I cross-referenced information from the Apollo Flight Journal and the First Men on the Moon website to match the camera angles in my scene in Blender, navigating the camera to the surface of a 3D model of the Apollo 11 landing site made with LROC Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) images and digital terrain model (DTM). Once the reconstructed version matched the original film from Aldrin's window to the best of my ability, I then rotated the camera in Blender to simulate what Armstrong might have seen through his window in the LM.

Discover more about this video at LROC’s website.