(Posted 10 January 2022) If you have a small telescope, you can locate the areas where the Apollo 11 and Apollo 17 astronauts walked on the Moon. Note that even the largest telescope on Earth or the Hubble Space Telescope can’t see the actual sites. For that, you can look at images taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Note there is a ‘best’ lunar day to look for the general vicinity of the landing sites. You want to look relatively early in each lunar month so that craters around the landing sites have a shadow. If you look later in the lunar month, the shadows will disappear as the Sun slowly moves overhead. This makes it harder for you to know you are looking at the right part of the Moon under high magnification.
The below chart shows a higher resolution view of where the Apollo 11 and 17 astronauts landed.
