What the original shows
A 6° field on the Moon, mostly in “lunar darkness” (hatched), with a lit crescent along the bottom. The 1969 program drew craters as ellipses, rays around Copernicus, and part of the outline of the Sea of Serenity.
Recomputed
The command module’s position comes from the Mission Report’s trajectory, propagated from the first midcourse correction to the printed time. The Moon’s features are from the IAU gazetteer (craters of 40 km and more) and the LROC mare outlines, and are labelled as reconstructed: the program’s crater models do not survive. “Up” is the spacecraft’s direction of travel, the rule recovered from Figure 6.
Why it does not match
Thresholds were set before measuring: disc and terminator within 2% of the diameter, features within 3%. Neither panel comes close.
- Size. At 70 hours the spacecraft was closer than the figure implies: the recomputed Moon is 20% larger than drawn in (a) and 73% larger in (b). Panel (a)’s disc matches the printed altitude (h_M = 20,876 miles), which the trajectory reaches at about 68 h 39 min. Panel (b) is drawn the same size as (a), although its printed altitude is 25% lower.
- Lighting. At 70–72 hours the Sun was almost directly behind the Moon (a phase angle of 175°): the recreation shows the Moon nearly new, as the crew saw it before lunar orbit insertion, eclipsing the Sun. The originals show a lit crescent across the bottom fifth of the disc, a phase angle nearer 120–130°.
- The labels. The trajectory analysis already found that Figure 7’s printed values disagree with the 1969 Apollo 11 views note they came from. Taken together, the figure looks drawn for a different time, or a different trajectory, than its captions say.
Features and the terminator are not compared at these misfits. Everything above is recorded as measured; nothing was adjusted to make it fit.
Limits
- The hatching rule, as on Figure 6, is not recovered; the recreation hatches along great circles through the Sun.
- Crater rays are not drawn.