You know, you can just wander over to NASA and see about a zillion photos from the moon mission. I was just a little kid at the time, but I remember gathering around the teevee set to watch… to see… well, I’m not sure what we were looking at. It was a blurry black and white video of a guy in a white deep-sea-diver-looking space suit climbing down a ladder. I think. On a tiny teevee screen, it was essentially a Rorschach blot for each viewer to puzzle over.

The still photos, however, are very detailed, and wonderful to look at. According to NASA, this is the most popular image they’ve got:

That’s Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon. You can see the first man, Neil Armstrong, reflected in Buzz’s visor. Buzz’s real name is Edwin Eugene, so I’m not surprised he wanted to be called Buzz. Buzz is like a lot of the first astronauts. He went to West Point and got a degree in mechanical engineering. Then he became a fighter pilot during the Korean War. He flew 66 missions and shot down a couple of MiGs. After that, he got a doctorate in astronautics from MIT and became an astronaut. If you’re wondering who used to be astronauts, imagine if the captain of the football team was also the Valedictorian and a combat jet pilot.

His doctoral thesis was titled: Line-of-Sight Guidance Techniques for Manned Orbital Rendezvous. I don’t have any inside information here, but I’ll bet dollars to donuts that it wasn’t plagiarized from Wikipedia. Well, that’s a pretty safe bet, as it was maybe the late 50s, but he didn’t copy it out of the Encyclopedia Britannica, either. People used to have to do something original to get a doctorate. And if you have a skeptical soul, and wonder if  maybe some MiG kills are just tall stories from fighter pilots, remember that even back then, they put cameras on the guns in Sabre jets:

Buzz got featured in Life magazine with that one.

You can do a lot of interesting things with images now that weren’t possible just a few years ago. A fellow decided that he’d remove the gold tint from the image of Aldrin’s visor, and see what he could see in the visor. This is what he discovered.

Let’s zoom in a bit:

Yup. That little blue dot was me, watching on the teevee. Littel Known Fact: I’m the first person to photobomb a moon mission image. Although, for some inexplicable reason, the Guinness Book still disputes my claim. I guess I’ll have to eat 66 grapes in three minutes using my feet. Again. I did it before, but I didn’t know there was a contest.