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| Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and the Lunar Module. |
Here's the photo I mistakenly attributed earlier. But I decided to give it its own post anyway. It's one of the most mesmerizing photos yet of two people walking on another world. Neil Armstrong was a pretty good photographer considering that those weren't the best lighting conditions to shoot in: Dark sky combined with a bright reflective surface, and everyone's wearing white. And then you have to work the camera while wearing those thick gloves. My hope is that I'll get to see this event replicated on a different world one day, even though I'm nowhere nearly as optimistic as I once was.
To Neil Armstrong, NASA, their Soviet counterparts, and all space explorers, past, present and future. Thank you.
Update: Charles Apple (via Robert T. Gonzalez) analyzes the dearth of good-quality images of the famous astronaut. I find it amusing that like many shutterbugs, Neil was actually camera-shy. He certainly took the majority of the Apollo 11 images, documenting Buzz's mission activities. It's also enlightening to find out that this famous portrait was manipulated. I knew that since the Hasselblad used by the crew exposes film in the 6x6 cm square format, the image had to at least been cropped at the sides. But it turns out that Neil was no different from most snap-shooters in that he tended to chop off people's extremities when taking their pictures. So the editors at NASA had to restore the top of Buzz's head and add in some extra sky to balance the composition. The results are aesthetically pleasing, but journalistically dubious to professional news organizations. Eh, I'm still okay running it for this blog.
