Full Moon

Amazon.com
In Full Moon, one of the best science photography books ever published, Michael Light presents a voyage in images to the Moon and back. Light took NASA's master negatives of photos taken by Apollo astronauts and scanned them electronically. The resulting pictures are so vivid they seem more clear than real life. Light orders the photos sequentially, selecting the most arresting images from each mission, to create a truly cinematic experience. In the first section, depicting blastoff, you can almost feel the violent shaking of the rocket as it strains to escape Earth's gravity. Then you see the quiet stillness of weightlessness, the astronauts' view down at a perfectly silent Earth, boundless oceans contrasting with bright white clouds. A spacewalk adds vertigo--the astronaut looks fragile and very alone as he floats outside his capsule far above his home planet. Then comes the waiting, as the long voyage toward the Moon continues.

As you watch the cratered surface get closer and closer, you have no sense of scale until you see the miniscule silver and gold lander dropping gently to land on the Moon. Leaving the cluttered interior of the capsule in bulky, awkward suits, the astronauts bring delicate tracings of color--gold on the lander; red, white, and blue on the spacesuits' flag patches--to this black-and-white world. Five huge gatefolds in this section give you indescribable views of the intricately scarred surface of the Moon.

You return to space for the reuniting of the lander and capsule, and a repetition of the tedious journey back home. Finally, you watch a chaotic splashdown in the riot of colors that is Earth.

A nice section in the back of the book explains each photo with a detailed caption, and an essay by author Andrew Chaikin (A Man on the Moon) adds more written context to this stunning visual experience. The book is printed on very high-quality paper, with matte black frames for the photos and a gorgeous, wordless cover. Every space fan should have a copy. --Therese Littleton


From School Library Journal
YA-A San Francisco artist and photographer has pulled together 129 stunning, black-and-white and color photographs from 32,000 previously unavailable pictures of the Apollo missions. He has lovingly put them together to form one continuous moon voyage. The photos, mostly taken by astronauts, show fiery, explosive liftoffs; gorgeous, striking earthscapes; astronauts floating by their single umbilical cords in space; hauntingly beautiful moon shots; and many alternate shots recognizably from the first moon landing. An essay and a section explaining when, where, and by whom all the photos were shot are included. A terrific addition for libraries that need tie-ins with science, photography, history, or creative curricula.John Lawson, Fairfax County Public Library, VA Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Light chooses 145 of the 32,000 photos taken by the Apollo astronauts; a 100,000-copy first printing.Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Entertainment Weekly, Chris Nashawaty
...gorgeous and hallucinatory.... A treasure.


From Booklist
NASA sent pilots not poets to the moon, yet Edwin Aldrin's comment about the moon's "magnificent desolation" eloquently condensed the moonwalkers' feelings about the scenery. Light reflected strangely off the cratered, pulverized surface, producing shades between brilliant white and charcoal black, all beneath a daytime sky of obsidian blackness. Some of the photographs taken during the moon missions have become iconic, but Light wanted to escape the greatest-hits rut in this album. Selecting 129 from the tens of thousands that the astronaut-photographers made, Light arranges them into a single launch-to-splashdown story, exactly as done by the documentary film For All Mankind (1989). He strives to achieve a number of effects: a sense of landscape grim but grand, evident throughout but particularly in several foldout panoramas, as well as a sense of the human scale set against such alien vistas. Depending on the photograph, one is aware of the triumph in the astronauts' lunar presence, the loneliness of a solitary, suited figure in the distance, the viscerally felt blue-white beauty of tiny, distant Earth, the wistful temporariness of the Apollo endeavor, now receding in memory decade by decade. The photographs are not only emotionally powerful but also top-quality because the printings were made directly from digital scans of the original film--apparently a first in publishing as all other reproductions have been made from copied film. A summary narrative about Apollo by Andrew Chaikin (A Man on the Moon, 1994) fills out this visual stunner that no library's space collection can do without. Gilbert Taylor


Book Description
The most thrilling of all journeys--the missions of the Apollo astronauts to the surface of the Moon and back--yielded 32,000 extraordinarily beautiful photographs, the record of a unique human achievement. Until recently, only a handful of these photographs had been released for publication; but now, for the first time, NASA has allowed a selection of the master negatives and transparencies to be scanned electronically, rendering the sharpest images of space that we have ever seen. Michael Light has woven 129 of these stunningly clear images into a single composite voyage, a narrative of breathtaking immediacy and authenticity that begins with the launch and is 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 splashdown.
Graced by five 45-inch-wide gatefolds that display the lunar landscape, from above the surface and at eye level, in unprecedented detail and clarity, Full Moon conveys on each page the excitement, disorientation, and awe that the astronauts themselves felt as they were shot into space and then as they explored an alien landscape and looked back at their home planet from hundreds of thousands of miles away.
Published on the thirtieth anniversary of Apollo 11--the first landing on the Moon--this remarkable and mesmerizing volume is, like the voyages it commemorates and re-creates, an experience both intimate and monumental.


From the Inside Flap
The most thrilling of all journeys--the missions of the Apollo astronauts to the surface of the Moon and back--yielded 32,000 extraordinarily beautiful photographs, the record of a unique human achievement. Until recently, only a handful of these photographs had been released for publication; but now, for the first time, NASA has allowed a selection of the master negatives and transparencies to be scanned electronically, rendering the sharpest images of space that we have ever seen. Michael Light has woven 129 of these stunningly clear images into a single composite voyage, a narrative of breathtaking immediacy and authenticity that begins with the launch and is 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 splashdown.

     Graced by five 45-inch-wide gatefolds that display the lunar landscape, from above the surface and at eye level, in unprecedented detail and clarity, Full Moon conveys on each page the excitement, disorientation, and awe that the astronauts themselves felt as they were shot into space and then as they explored an alien landscape and looked back at their home planet from hundreds of thousands of miles away.

Published on the thirtieth anniversary of Apollo 11--the first landing on the Moon--this remarkable and mesmerizing volume is, like the voyages it commemorates and re-creates, an experience both intimate and monumental.


About the Author
Michael Light is an artist and photographer based in San Francisco. His work is in the collections of The Center for Creative Photography and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His photo-novel, Ranch, was published in 1994.

Andrew Chaikin, who contributed an essay to this volume, is the author of the definitive study of the Apollo missions, A Man on the Moon (1994), which was the basis of the award-winning television series From the Earth to the Moon.


Buy from Amazon     Compare Prices

[Full Moon] is a masterpiece-the kind of work that elicited a gasp from me with almost every turn of the page. You achieved, through your choice of photos, the nuts and bolts, the majesty, loneliness, the brazen hubris and the inspired genius of our going to the moon. Bravo. I applaud your originality. Again, bravo. — Tom Hanks


Buy from Barnes & Noble     Compare Prices