Full Moon is a photographic journey to the Moon and back, drawn from NASA's 32,000 pictures from the Apollo missions. For the first time NASA has allowed 900 of the 'master' negatives and transparencies to be taken offsite for electronic scanning so as to produce the sharpest images of space that we have ever seen. From this selection of 'master' photographs Michael Light has distilled a single composite journey beginning with the launch, followed by a walk in space, an orbit of the Moon, a lunar landing and exploration and ...
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Full Moon is a photographic journey to the Moon and back, drawn from NASA's 32,000 pictures from the Apollo missions. For the first time NASA has allowed 900 of the 'master' negatives and transparencies to be taken offsite for electronic scanning so as to produce the sharpest images of space that we have ever seen. From this selection of 'master' photographs Michael Light has distilled a single composite journey beginning with the launch, followed by a walk in space, an orbit of the Moon, a lunar landing and exploration and a return to Earth with an orbit and splash-down. Five enormous gatefold panoramas show the extraordinary lunar landscape. These photographs reveal not only the hardware of lunar exploration in exquisite detail but also the profound aesthetics of space in what could be described as the ultimate landscape photography. The reader is encouraged to view these pictures as more than a spectacle. You start to experience them with a sense of the accompanying disorientation and excitement that the astronaurs themselves would have felt. Full Moon was originally published in 1999 to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the first landing on the Moon. It was a milestone publication for the millennium, greeted with acclaim worldwide and published in eight countries. This new compact edition preserves all the superb quality of reproduction which was so evident in the original and makes this extraordinary work available to a still wider audience.
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Yes, Michael Light could have chosen better known photgraphs. Yes, Michael Light could have supplied NASA Index numbers for each photo. Yes, Michael Light could have done many things differently.
What Michael Light has produced is one of the most stunning collections of photographs I have ever seen in a single volume. I have sat looking at these images and found it hard to drag myself away. The stark monochromatic beauty of the moon together with the fragile humanity embodied in the astronauts has been exposed in a way I have never seen before.
I cannot understand why NASA has never made better use of its image library in bringing to the attention of the public its space program. If a picture paints a thousand words then this volume would take a lifetime to read.