Apollo 11's Aristarchus glow

Aristarchus is the brightest large crater on the Moon's near side, and on 19 July 1969 Apollo 11 was in its first orbits around the Moon. According to the account the archive holds, German astronomers had reported a bright flashing glow from the crater and NASA asked the crew to observe it. The telling says the astronauts confirmed an anomalous brightness with a fluorescence to it even while the crater lay in shadow, that NASA never explained it, and that scientists who investigated reportedly lost their jobs.

What is on the record

One telling carries this case through one channel. The archive resolves three claimants, the three men aboard the spacecraft: Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins. No documents are attached.

The exchange itself sits outside the archive's holdings but is public. NASA's Apollo Flight Journal transcript has CapCom Bruce McCandless at 076:57 telling the crew that lunar transient events had been reported near Aristarchus. At 077:12 Armstrong answered that he could not be sure he was looking at the right crater but that an area there was "considerably more illuminated than the surrounding area" and seemed to have "a slight amount of fluorescence to it". Aldrin followed a minute later and said the area seemed to be reflecting earthshine and that he was not sure he was seeing any phosphorescence. Collins added that there did not appear to be any colour in it. The report from Earth came from observers at Bochum in West Germany.

The ordinary reading is also on the record. The crater was on the night side of the Moon and lit by earthshine, and the journal's editors read the crew's remarks as a very bright crater under earthlight rather than a glow of its own. Transient lunar phenomena remain an open subject, with outgassing and observing conditions the usual candidates. The job-loss claim reaches the telling second-hand: the physicist making it says the lunar geologist Peter Schultz told him that two lunar scientists, Middlehurst and Cameron, were pressured out of the work in the early 1970s. The archive has found no record of anyone losing a job over this.

Why it sits where it does

The case grades L3 on its three named claimants, all aboard the same spacecraft on the same pass. Every one of them reaches the archive through a single video from a single channel, so the tier measures how many people the telling names and not how independently they reached it. The transcript is the strong part of this record. What the crew saw is not resolved here, though the explanation of record is earthshine on the brightest crater on the Moon.