 Lovell continued to describe the terrain they were passing over . One of the crew 's major tasks was reconnaissance of planned future landing sites on the Moon , especially one in Mare Tranquillitatis that would be the Apollo 11 landing site . The launch time of Apollo 8 had been chosen to give the best lighting conditions for examining the site . A film camera had been set up in one of the spacecraft windows to record a frame every second of the Moon below . Bill Anders spent much of the next 20 hours taking as many photographs as possible of targets of interest . By the end of the mission the crew had taken 700 photographs of the Moon and 150 of the Earth . 
