I have long been fascinated by the Apollo program and all that went into flyhing those missions to the Moon. Starting with Apollo 13, the S-IVB rocket stage - the 3rd stage of the Saturn V rocket - was targeted to impact the Moon in order to provide a data point for the Seismic stations left on the Moon by earlier missions. Ewen Whitaker, a fellow Lunar and Planetary Laboratory researcher had first identified the impact craters of some of these stages in images taken by the Apollo 16 Panorama cameras that flew in the SIM bays on the Apollo service modules during Apollo 15, 16 and 17. More recently, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbit has imaged the impact craters in even higher resolution and that inspired me to do several sketches of what one of these sites would look like to visitors.

The painting was completed on March 22, 2015. It is a 16 by 20 inch acrylic on canvas.

Last update: March 1, 2016