The first Apollo landing on July 20, 1969 took place in the open flats of the Mare Tranquillitatis, just north of Theophilus. This location was chosen precisely because it was so flat, as the planners of the lunar mission wanted the first landing to be as easy as possible.
Even so, Neil Armstrong realized that they were headed for a rough area and took over manual control of the lunar lander to put it down on a smoother area, almost running out of fuel in the process.
Today there are three small craters just north of the Apollo 11 landing site named for the three first Apollo astronauts. Armstrong, at 2.9 miles (4.6 km) is the largest of the three. Aldrin is 2.1 miles (3.4 km) in diameter, and Collins is only 1.5 miles (2.4 km) large.
These small craters are a challenge to spot using small amateur telescopes but represent a great rarity: lunar craters named after living people. In most cases, you need to be dead to have a crater named after you.
Two years later, on July 30 1971, Apollo 15 touched down in a much more mountainous area to the northwest of the Apollo 11 landing site. The Apollo 15 site was located in a small valley just west of Mount Hadley, where a rugged mountain range, called the Lunar Apennines, forms a wedge between the Mare Serenitatis and the Mare Imbrium.
A long, narrow groove meanders across this valley, the Rima Hadley, and the astronauts explored this feature on the ground. If you have a fairly large telescope, at least 8 inches aperture, and lighting conditions are just right, you can get a "bird's eye" view of this surface feature yourself.
If you explore the Apollo landing sites with a small telescope, you won’t be able to see any of the objects left behind by the astronauts, as they are all too small to be resolved by even the largest telescopes.
In fact, it's only in the last two years that we’ve been able to photograph the landing sites in detail from theLunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
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