I find it fitting that this week’s anniversary of mankind’s first landing on the moon coincides with a current lunar event, the partial eclipse on this past Tuesday. Not that I ever need a reason to point my camera up at the big silver dish in the sky. Looking for the man on the moon.
50 years ago to this day, July 20th 1969, Commander Neil Armstrong and lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin landed the Apollo Lunar Module Eagle at the Sea of Tranquility at 20:17 UTC. Armstrong became the first person to step onto the moon’s surface six hours later, speaking the famous words “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”. Buzz Aldrin joined him 19 minutes later, while fellow astronaut Michael Collins flew the command module Columbia in the lunar orbit.
As a child, I was amazed by those sketchy black&white images of astronauts jumping around the dusty surface of the moon on my parent’s TV, my very earliest television memory. Although I doubt it was Apollo 11 (I was just two and a half years old), probably one of the later missions.
But since them I’m deeply awed by this greatest adventure of mankind. Apollo 13 (with Tom Hanks) is still my favorite movie, the great coffee table book “Full Moon” (featuring the photographs of the Apollo missions) one of my favorite photographic publications.
And I love pointing my camera up at the silver dish in the night sky. The above photo I took last Tuesday during the early stages of the partial lunar eclipse. I used the Olympus OM-D E-M1X with the mZuiko 40-150mm F/2.8 Pro Zoom with the MC-14 TeleConverter, giving me a focal length of 210mm (equals 420mm in full frame). I shot this handheld at 1/320 sec – f/5 – ISO 200 (the good thing is the moon is so bright there is no problem shooting a zoom image handheld – you almost always have sufficient shutter speeds).
I’m always on the lookout for the man on the moon.
Wish you a great Saturday!
Marcus
Related Posts: