Thanks for the tip
Where did you read about 7587? I haven't seen that information in any of the photographic indices at that AFJ/ALSJ.
7581 is definitely Earth, and its configuration is consistent with a post-TEI view. 7582-3 are labelled as Earth but it is difficult to tell, although the size of the body masked by the lens flare and the lit crescent are consistent with that being correct based on 7581. That same crescent is visible in 7584-7 images labelled as 'Solar Eclipse', but we know that the Solar Eclipse wasn't observed until the 24th. Besides that they'd also run out of colour film by then, which is why they resorted to using the 16mm DAC.
Ill definitely check out Celestia though
I picked that up here. https://archive.org/details/AS12-51-7587. Can't speak to it's accuracy though, I just used it as a first guess. Out of curiosity, I pinged the question to Eric Jones who responded with his own Celestia screen shot suggesting Zubelgenubi-Venus-Zubeneschamali. This fits, but requires earth to be in frame. In support, Eric provides this quote from the transcript...
Conrad: It's - Venus is just below the Earth, and we can see Venus quite clearly, well, you can see all kinds of stars, but Venus is just below the Earth. This is - This is really a sight to behold, to see it at night time like this.
241:30:52 GET
Your mileage may vary, but I discarded this on the basis that Earth would appear in frame, and in attempting to photograph stars, they would have pointed the camera at the darkest spot, maybe? But TBH we are seeking a needle in a stack of needles.
Finding a needle in a stack of needles is my speciality
Conrad's quote is relating to their observation of the eclipse, so Earth may well have been the darkest spot at that point!
If it's a trio of stars (and it's still open to question whether they are celestial bodies!) then it shouldn't really matter where the observer is in the Earth-Moon plane, or (up to a point) when the observer is - unless an inconvenient home planet is in the way.
It's much more useful for our purposes if at least one of them is a planet, as that position fixes it with much more certainty in the timeline of the mission. I would have thought that if they were genuinely trying to take an image of stellar objects they'd have picked the brightest they could see, ie one of the planets.
All that said, it's just as likely that someone cataloguing the images looked at this one, saw a few dots and said "uuummm....yeah, stars, must be."
Thanks for the help though