Apollo was about 15 years after I got into the hobby and was into astrophotography. So this is a bit off topic but one thing some of us did at the time was look for water dumps from the capsule on the way to and from the moon. We had a club member (high school student) who was a math whiz (he's now a math professor). He calculated the trajectory for our parallax and give us a time line. We'd then follow that tracjectory with the scope. No way we'd see the capsule except for a very rare (think I saw 2 in all missions) specular reflection from the craft in is rotisserie mode. But for the two days they were closest to the earth the water dumps were very obvious. I never caught one in the process but by listening to the news could tell when one had happened then I'd run to my 10" and look for it. They were nice little moving nebula. The first day the motion was very obvious, slower the second day and often very faint.

I find it interesting that those that believe the moon hoax either don't know about the amateurs that followed Apollo or ignore us. Those that point out their errors never mention us either. Phil you are ignoring those of us that actually watched these water dumps that the hoaxers claim never happened.

For Apollo 8 I also assembled a 5 foot moon image made from dozens of prints of mine taken of the moon cut and pasted to a board. I then put a string across it to show the orbit of the capsule. One network tried to find it using a 22" Celestron SCT (anyone remember when that was their flagship telescope?) at some facility in Denver but seeing was awful and their camera way too light insensitive. I knew not to try with my 10" but did move a bead along that string when they were orbiting on the earth side of the moon. A step up from Aurora's crayon but no more effective. It just gave me some sense of what was happening.

Rick