Apollo 17 Visual Media VM6 — Lunar Anomaly Image, 1972

The frame looks across a flat, pale valley floor toward low rounded hills, with a dark shadow in the lower left and the film's reseau crosses visible. Apollo 17 landed in the Taurus-Littrow valley in December 1972.

The yellow enlargement box was added for the release. It magnifies a tiny cluster of three faint points in the black sky above the right-hand slope: two bluish points and one orange one.

The points are extremely small and dim, with no visible shape, so nothing about their size or distance can be read from this image.

The release does not identify them. Faint colored points on scanned color film can also be film or scan artifacts, so treat the annotation as something to test rather than a conclusion.

The Apollo 17 transcript record in this archive describes bright particles seen from the spacecraft during a maneuver early in the flight. That is a different situation from a photograph taken on the lunar surface, and the two should not be merged into one event.