At the recent Institute of Physics Teachers’ Group AGM, Anu Ohja from the National Space Centre in Leicester drew our attention to this incredible photograph of the Apollo Lunar Module returning to dock with the Command/Service Module.
The amazing thing about this photograph is that it contains all of humanity with the exception of one person.
Everybody alive, except for Michael Collins, who took the photograph, appears in this photograph: the entire population of Earth, plus Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin aboard the Apollo LM.
That is remarkable.
I wonder how many photos like that exist, how many people have taken one, and how hard it would be, now, to make a photo like that – it gets a lot easier with a really wide angle camera :-)
I can imagine people in the future wanting to take such a photo and the increasing difficulty of getting to a point where the convex hull of humanity fits in to your view finder so that you can do so.
It’s a remarkable photo!
But a point could be made that Michael Collins is ‘in the picture’ in the same way as the part of humanity located on the opposite/invisible sides of the planet – especially if we take the the bottom right corner into account :)