Ron Howard’s movie, “In the Shadow of the Moon”, is an outstanding documentary of the Apollo lunar missions. The film features carefully remastered NASA footage, most of which hasn’t seen the light of day since it was shot, laboriously synced with audio recordings that were stored separately. Most importantly, it features material from recent interviews with ten surviving crew members, with comments about the personal experience of the voyages and opinions about what they meant.

    I once worked on an Apollo spacecraft, at Kennedy Space Center, stacked on a Saturn for launch. You can find details near the end of the “Astronomy” page of my web site. Howard’s movie shows footage of places I have been (all on Earth, alas), and I can attest to its authenticity. Moreover, it captures something of the feeling that pervaded the program. The phrase “sense of wonder” has been done to death in literary criticism of science fiction, but those words are inadequate anyway. Apollo felt like something mythical or theological, yet unlike all of humanity’s gods and most of humanity’s heroes, it was not made-up; it was real. You felt you were going to wake up, but you never did – human voyages to another world were actually happening. To another world …

    A couple of scenes stand out: The landings were all timed for just past local lunar dawn, with the Lunar Module descending with the Sun behind it. That meant that the spacecraft would draw close to the Moon within its shadow – whence the movie’s title – and perform the burn to enter lunar orbit over a pitch-black moonscape, on the side of the Moon away from Earth. The astronauts’ first close-up view of the Moon occurred shortly thereafter, as the vehicle slowly orbited out of darkness and the first dim glow of illuminated landscape appeared below. The movie had some wonderful footage shot from a Command Module window at this time, as little by little, feature by feature, the lunar surface slowly emerged from night. The part of the Moon not visible from Earth had of course already been photographed by space probes, but only Apollo astronauts have seen it with the naked eye.

    Then there was footage taken from an aft-pointing camera as the ascent stage of Lunar Module Eagle lifted away from Tranquillity Base. There was a brief flurry of dust and swirling gas, followed by a wide-angle straight-down panorama of the entire area, with the foil American flag blown tumbling across the landscape by Eagle’s exhaust plume, and with the array of footprints and gear left by Armstrong and Aldrin centered on the fast-diminishing abandoned descent stage, like some enormous extraterrestrial mandala graven into the gray lunar dust.

    If you have ever wondered what the Apollo program was like – what it felt like – “In the Shadow of the Moon” is a good movie to see. I’m enthused enough that I will probably see it again. Apollo was a haunting experience: With thanks to Cat Stevens for the metaphor, I guess I’m still being followed by a Moon shadow, even after all these years.