W-I-D-E on Wednesday: A Treasure

I've taken the liberty of making a diptych of two wide photos for Bobsblips's Widwed challenge this week. As I'm just 2 days postop from my hernia repair on Monday I'm not walking very far from home for the next few days so I wanted to find a suitable "treasure" inside the house. (My Editor wasn't keen to be photographed, and she's not very wide anyway!)

I chose to blip a couple of double-page spreads from this fabulous book ("Apollo Remastered") which documents the whole Apollo program photographically. My Editor gave me the book as a present for a "big" birthday in late 2022 - and to me it's a real treasure. In that year a British guy called Andy Saunders got access to recent high resolution scans of the original flight films from the Apollo space program back in the 1960s - the films are usually securely stored in a freezer, to help maintain their condition, in Building 8 at Johnson Space Center, Houston, but he was able to digitally remaster them so that they're much better than the originals. He then used them to create this book.


As a lad in the 1960s I followed the Apollo program avidly and have lots of newspaper cuttings from the time. I even sat up most of the night back in July 1969, glued to the TV when Apollo 11 landed at Tranquility Base in the early hours (British time), with a camera pointed at the TV screen to capture the moment for myself (see the extra - although it's not very clear!). Hence my love for this book. It also takes me back to a trip we made in May 2015 to the Houston Space Centre where we did a guided VIP tour of the premises.

Look large on a computer if you can - it's worth it!