Image copyright AFP/Getty Images Image caption The white bag still carries traces of Moon dust and small rock 
 
 A bag used by US astronaut Neil Armstrong to collect the first ever samples of the Moon has sold at auction in New York for $1.8m (£1.4m). 
 
 The outer decontamination bag from the Apollo 11 mission in 1969 was bought at Sotheby's by an anonymous bidder. 
 
 The white bag still carries traces of Moon dust and small rocks. 
 
 The auction comes after a legal battle over the ownership of the only artefact from the Apollo 11 mission which was in private hands. 
 
 After the spacecraft returned to Earth, nearly all the equipment was sent to the Smithsonian museums. 
 
 However, the bag was left in a box at the Johnson Space Center because of an inventory error. 
 
 It was then misidentified during a government auction, selling for just $995 to a lawyer from Illinois in 2015. 
 
 Nasa later tried to get the bag back, but earlier this year a federal judge ruled that it legally belonged to the buyer, who then offered it for sale at Sotheby's. ||||| NEW YORK (AP) — A bag containing traces of moon dust sold for $1.8 million at an auction on Thursday following a galactic court battle. 
 
 The collection bag, used by astronaut Neil Armstrong during the first manned mission to the moon in 1969, was sold at a Sotheby's auction of items related to space voyages. The buyer declined to be identified. The pre-sale estimate was $2 million to $4 million. 
 
 The artifact from the Apollo 11 mission had been misidentified and sold at an online government auction, and NASA had fought to get it back. But in December a federal judge ruled that it legally belonged to a Chicago-area woman who bought it in 2015 for $995. 
 
 Sotheby's declined to identify the seller. However, details of the 2015 purchase were made public during the court case. 
 
 Investigators unknowingly hit the moon mother lode in 2003 while searching the garage of a man later convicted of stealing and selling museum artifacts, including some that were on loan from NASA. 
 
 The 12-by-8½-inch (30-by-20-centimeter) bag was misidentified and sold at an online government auction. 
 
 Nancy Carlson, of Inverness, Illinois, got an ordinary-looking bag made of white Beta cloth and polyester with rubberized nylon and a brass zipper. 
 
 Carlson, a collector, knew the bag had been used in a space flight, but she didn't know which one. She sent it to NASA for testing, and the government agency, discovering its importance, fought to keep it. 
 
 The artifact "belongs to the American people," NASA said then. 
 
 U.S. District Judge J. Thomas Marten, in Wichita, Kansas, said that while it shouldn't have gone up for auction he didn't have the authority to reverse the sale. He ordered the government to return it. 
 
 The judge said the importance and desirability of the bag stemmed solely from the efforts of NASA employees whose "amazing technical achievements, skill and courage in landing astronauts on the moon and returning them safely have not been replicated in the almost half a century since the Apollo 11 landing." 
 
 When it comes to moon landings, Thursday's auction is far from the final frontier. 
 
 A group called For All Moonkind Inc. mentioned the moon bag this week while campaigning for "measures to preserve and protect the six Apollo lunar landing sites." It plans to take up the issue next month at the Starship Congress 2017 in California. 
 
 Also getting out-of-this-world interest at the auction was the Flown Apollo 13 Flight Plan, with handwritten notations by all three crew members. It sold to an online bidder for $275,000, well above its pre-sale estimate high of $40,000.
– One small inventory error has led to a giant payday for Illinois woman Nancy Lee Carlson. A moon dust collection bag that Carlson bought for just $995 in an online government auction in 2015 sold for $1.8 million at a Sotheby's auction in New York Thursday, the BBC reports. The bag, marked "Lunar Sample Bag," was used by Neil Armstrong to collect moon dust during the Apollo 11 mission in 1969 and still contains small rocks and traces of lunar dust, the AP reports. The buyer declined to be identified. The bag is believed to be the only artifact from the Apollo 11 mission in private hands. It was among items that the FBI seized from the home of Max Ary, the former director of a Kansas space museum, in 2003. NASA tried to get the bag back when it realized it had been misidentified and sold, but a federal judge ruled in Carlson's favor. She plans to use some of the proceeds to set up a scholarship at Northern Michigan University. The bag was sold among 180 lots Sotheby's auctioned off to mark the 48th anniversary of the first moon landing. Other items included the Apollo 13 flight plan, which sold for $275,000.