“HE WAS A TOURIST, a quarter-million miles from home. And like any traveler, he wanted to bring home a special memory.
So Apollo16 astronaut Charles M. Duke Jr. came up with a plan. Several months before his scheduled 1972 mission to the moon, Duke receveid permission from NASA to leave behind a family photograph. The picture—of Duke, wife Dorothy, and sons Charles III and Thomas—was taken by a friend in the Dukes’ Houston, Texas, backyard several week before the April 16 liftoff.
Astronaut Duke was given intensive photography training prior to the mission. He was taught about f-stops, exposure, and learned how to operate a custom Hasselblad camera. He took thousands of practice pictures and hundreds on the moon. But he never considered himself much of a photographer. “Just a point-and-shoot man,” he said decades later.
In the final hour of the final day of his three-day visit to the moon, Duke took out the shrink-wrapped family snapshot and gingerly placed it on the lunar surface, near the crater Descartes. It was a gift, his message to whoever might one day stumble upon it. He then took a snapshot of a snapshot. Evidence. A memory.” (Who We Were by Michael Williams, Richard Cahan and Nicholas Osborn, Chicago Cityfiles Press, 2008, p. 238).
Actually, he took at least three snaphotd : AS16-117-18839, AS16-117-18840 and AS16-117-18841, though the last one is clearly the best shot.
Previously on Skandalon: Apollo, Nicholas Osborn.
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