Over the past four months, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft, in low polar orbit over the Moon, has returned images of Apollo landing sites showing the vessels at rest on the Moon's surface.

The most recent of these is a high-resolution view of the first manned-landing site where Apollo 11 touched down on July 20, 1969. On the right are the bright, stony rays of West Crater, and at the left edge is the lower stage of the lunar module, gleaming like a pinpoint of light on the gray, cratered plain. The detail is such that if Neil Armstrong were walking there now, we could make him out.

Perhaps the wistfulness is caused by the sense of simple grandeur in those Apollo missions. Perhaps it's a reminder of the risk we all felt after the Eagle had landed -- the possibility that the astronauts might be stranded on the Moon. But it may also be that a photograph like this one is as close as we're able to come to looking directly back into the human past.

There the lunar module sits, parked just where it landed 40 years ago, as if it still really were 40 years ago and all the time since merely imaginary.

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