~ Sharing my memory of that day as seen through they eyes and mind of a young girl ~
On the afternoon of Monday the 21st July 1969 on the Gold Coast here in Queensland, Australia.
When I was a young girl our teacher let us go out onto the veranda of our school and listen to the astronauts walk on the surface of the Moon which was being broadcast on his small portable transistor radio.
In those days there were no TV sets in the classroom just wooden tables and chairs and a blackboard where our lessons were written in chalk…Oh, how things have changed now!
We were all very excited to be given some time out of the classroom to listen to this incredible event which happened just after our big lunch, which I later realized was at about 1.30pm in the afternoon.
Later that afternoon after playing with my three brothers and just before dinner I ran outside all by myself and looked up at the sky and saw the Moon…I remember having this funny feeling in my tummy of excitement to think that those men had travelled so far in a space rocket and were now up there on the surface of the Moon…
I was truly very wide eyed and amazed, and then I ran back inside and ate my dinner all happy and full of wonderment at the adventure of it all.
I will honestly admit that I’ve never really stopped looking up at the night sky and being absolutely blown away with the utter beauty of the universe. As an added bonus, over many years now I’ve learnt to capture with my camera lenses and telescope so many of these incredible celestial objects.
But I always come back to my most favourite celestial body, our beautiful wonderful Moon :-)
I made this photomontage in remembrance of this remarkable 50th year event; two of the images are from the incredible Apollo 11 mission. The first image is of our glorious blue planet Earth as seen from the Moon that is nearly 400,000kms away, the second image is an iconic picture of Buzz Aldrin by the American flag that Neil Armstrong took just before they both blasted off from the lunar surface on the 21st July 1969.
The lunar image to the right is of the 9 day old Moon which I took on the 11th July 2019 so I could capture the whole of the Sea of Tranquillity and the Sea of Serenity…this is the view (or orientation) of the Moon as seen here in the southern hemisphere, with south at the top and north at the bottom. It shows quite clearly the area in the Sea of Tranquillity where the lunar module ‘Eagle’ landed.
My lunar image was taken with a 10 inch Meade LX200 Schmidt-Cassegrain with an f6.3 focal reducer with a ZWO ASI120MC-S camera attached. The ZWO camera also had a focal reducer attached to widen the field of view through this large aperture telescope. I captured an AVI movie file with 1500 frames that were stacked in RegiStax6 and processed in PS CS4.
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