Moon Landing 50th Anniversary and my 'Small Part' in The Story

Hey All ! 50 years ago I was Photographer for the Geology Dept. University College London, Gower Street -- Boss let me order a Asahi Pentax S1A + Pentax Copy Stand + 50mm f4 Macro-Takumar with which I took loads of Fossils, Rocks, photos for Slide Lectures on Ferraniacolor etc etc but one day we were sent a Microscope Slide from NASA containing some of the Moon Dust which Neil Armstrong put into his pocket -- so 50 years later I did a Video about it which you can see here

Great story Pete, tanks for sharing. I wonder if the school still has that slide in its collection.

What a story, Pete! Enjoyed it immensely! Thank you so much for posting it!

Very nice story to hear. Congratulations.

You made are very worthy contribution.

My contribution to the Lunar landing was just after I graduated and started work at Hughes Aircraft I watched the landing unfold on television. My contributions came later when I worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the Voyager I and II and Galileo. So I guess that almost makes up for sitting on my ass at the beach in Santa Monica while the lunar landing took place.

At the time of the first Moon landing at nine years old I had recently begun to get interested in mineral collecting. I wrote to NASA asking if they could spare a small piece of moon rock for my collection. They replied saying they didn't have any to spare but sent me a terrific pack of colour photos from the mission and all kinds of NASA publicity material.

Two or three years later a sample collected from the Moon made a tour of British museums. It was displayed under a plastic dome with all kinds of security measures in place. Fortunately, one of the members of the local mineral and mining club of which I was a member was also the natural history curator of Plymouth Museum. He arranged an evening when a group of us came in and were able to handle the specimen. Though there was a certain thrill in handling a piece of Moon rock, the sample itself was actually rather uninspiring. And no, I didn't get to scrape a piece off with my fingernail! Apparently the sample was accurately weighed before it was despatched from the US and would be as accurately weighed on its return!
Steve

That is an interesting Story too, Steve !

What a great story! Thanks for sharing with us.