Thursday, March 28, 2019

"the moon's a balloon" ( David Niven)

See here: for this week's sepia saturday 
 "Going up and down but never getting anywhere"........ 
In 1972, as Charles Duke was training to visit the moon with Apollo 16, he regretted spending so much time away from his wife and sons.
“So just to get the kids excited about what dad was going to do, I said, ‘Would y’all like to go to the moon with me?'” “We can take a picture of the family and so the whole family can go to the moon.” “I talked with Dotty and the boys about it and they were delighted about having a picture of the Duke family on the Moon,” he wrote in his autobiography, Moonwalker.
 “So one day, Ludy Benjamin, a NASA photographer and good friend, came over to our house in Lago and took a picture of the four of us. On the back of the picture I wrote, ‘This is the family of astronaut Charles Duke of planet Earth, who landed on the moon on the twentieth of April 1972.’
Then we all signed it and put our thumbprints on the back.”
 On April 23 Duke and John Young went exploring with the lunar rover in the Descartes Highlands, and he dropped the photo, wrapped in plastic, onto the surface and photographed it with his Hasselblad camera.
 He left it there. “After 43 years, the temperature of the moon every month goes up to 400 degrees [Fahrenheit] in our landing area, and at night it drops almost absolute zero,” he said in 2015.
 “Shrink wrap doesn’t turn out too well in those temperatures.
It looked OK when I dropped it, but I never looked at it again and I would imagine it’s all faded out by now.”

4 comments:

La Nightingail said...

A really neat and interesting take on the prompt! Too bad he couldn't (or didn't have time to) find a wrapping that might have protected the photo from such extreme temperatures.

Joian said...

And that is why I have missed you. Such interesting facts and twists on the prompt. Thanks.

Mike Brubaker said...

When I've visited some ancient structures — stone circles, Roman ruins, Castles, etc. I've been troubled by the layers of graffiti — Kilroy was here! — which humans through the ages have felt compelled to add, marking their brief moment in an historical timeline. Not that the astronauts shouldn't be proud of their unique achievement, but it's just another example of mankind's futile effort to pretend we matter in the universe.

Molly's Canopy said...

An interesting take on the prompt, and a totally unique photo experience for the astronaut's family. Women have long had to struggle with work-family balance. Nice to see a father finding a way to include his children in a historic moment of his work life.

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