LM in flight, with Earth rise

Day 4: "As we ease around on the left side of the Moon," says Aldrin, "I marvel again at the precision of our path. We have missed hitting the Moon by a paltry 300 nautical miles, at a distance of nearly a quarter of a million miles from Earth, and don't forget that the Moon is a moving target and that we are racing through the sky just ahead of its leading edge.

"When we launched the other day the Moon was nowhere near where it is now; it was some 40 degrees of arc, or nearly 200,000 miles, behind where it is now, and yet those big computers in the basement in Houston [at NASA's Mission Control] didn't even whimper but belched out super-accurate predictions....

"The accuracy of the overall system is phenomenal: out of a total of nearly 3,000 feet per second, we have velocity errors in our body axis coordinate system of only a tenth of 1 foot per second in each of the three directions."

This image shows the Eagle lunar lander on July 21 making its docking approach to the Columbia after leaving the moon's surface. The dark section of the surface is Smyth's Sea, and the object in the background, of course, is Earth.