This is probably the most useless photo I've ever put on here. By 'useless' I guess I mean to say that it conveys no information about Schenectady, it's clearly uninteresting as a photograph and it's not showing a celebrity or anything.
It's a rock. A small piece of a rock, actually. Polished, embedded in plastic, it's unremarkable in how... ordinary it looks.
It's a rock from the Moon. Jack Schmitt picked it up on the first day of the very last Apollo mission (
Apollo 17) to the moon. He found it 60m from the Lunar Module (east, between the LM and SEP), put it in a sample collection bag which went into a sample collection box (you know that NASA has acronyms for all this stuff, right?) and that box was hoisted into the Ascent Module. They left the moon, docked with the Command Module and transferred the box there, sealed with lunar vacuum inside. After a fiery re-entry, the box was transferred to an aircraft carrier, then to the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, where a slew of scientists
got to work on it. It was sliced into several pieces, each one carefully documented. The original rock was designated sample
70215. I know, how glamorous can you get? The itty bitty piece here is called 70215,11.
This tiny piece of the moon travels the US in a NASA trailer. Inside the trailer is a bit of information about the space station, a bit about Orion / Constellation (the Shuttle replacement proposals) and what seems to me to be a very little bit about The Moon Rock.
Which I touched.
And so I was very happy that it came to the Schenectady Museum. It's not the sort of photo that means much to anyone else, but I'm posting this one for me.
| F Number | 5.0 |
| Lens ID | Lumix 14-45mm F3.5-5.6 |
| Focal Length | 26.0 mm (35 mm equivalent: 52.0 mm) |
| Exposure Time | 1/10 |
| Exposure Program | Program AE |
| ISO | 800 |
| Exposure Compensation | 0 |
| Flash | Off, Did not fire |
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