We are getting near the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moonwalk. At the time of the moonwalk, I had a summer job working on a glaciology project with Prof. Barcley Kamb of Caltech. I was an undergraduate at UCSD at the time. We were camped along the side of the Blue Glacier on Mt. Olympus. There is a research station on the Snow Dome higher on the mountain. We had stayed there during a similar project in 1967. The station was occupied by a University of Washington group, who were our collaborators in 1967 but were doing a different project in 1969. They had flown in a television to watch the Apollo mission. When the time came, we hiked up to the station to witness the historic events on the moon. While there, I took a couple of photos of the moon over Mt. Olympus. They are shown below.

On July 13, 2019, I digitized the slides using my Pentax K5 and a 100 mm macro lens, all attached to piece of angle iron. This is how I am, slowly, digitizing many of my old slides. Using Google Earth to get the azimuth of Mt Olympus from the research station and the web site www.dailymoonposition.com/default.aspx to get the moon's position at various times, I deduced the approximate times the photos were taken. Actually the moon positions are for Port Angeles which is about 25 miles away. The error should be less than 2 minutes. The film did not have any recorded data like times. The first photo below was taken at about 18:27 PDT, or about 1.5 hours before Neil Armstrong stepped off the lander onto the moon at 1956 PDT. I took this one while passing time between the landing and the moonwalk. The second photo was taken at about 21:10 PDT (around sunset), or after Armstrong had been walking on the moon for 1.25 hours and while he was still there. This was taken after the excitement of the actual step onto the moon had died down.

Seeing the moonwalk from such a unique location certainly enhanced my memories of this significant event in human history.

The digital photos have been lightly processed in Adobe Lightroom.

The original photos were taken using a Leica IIIc rangefinder camera that my father acquired just after World War II from one of the first soldiers who reached the factory in Germany. I still have it, but have not used it in a long time. It has a fixed 50mm lens. The film was Kodachrome II. After 50 years, the photos are in essentially original condition as are all the rest of my Kodachrome slides. They have been stored in a projector tray on a bookshelf, so they have been in the dark in a dry climate, but no other measures have been taken to preserve them. That was a good film!

Note that there is information about the time and camera below some of the photos. Those are from the exif data with the digital photos and refer to when the digital copy was made.
 
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Click on the image for a screen size version.

Sizes: Screen     2000     Full The moon over Mt Olympus while the Eagle Lander of the Apollo 11 mission was on the surface. The photo was taken about 1.5 hours before Neil Armstrong stepped off the lander onto the surface to begin his moonwalk.

Sizes: Screen     2000     Full The moon over the side of Mt Olympus from the Snowdome research station taken after Neil Armstrong had been on the surface of the moon for about 1.25 hours.