Full Moon | 
 enlarge | Author: Michael Light
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $50.00
Buy Used: $3.79
You Save: $46.21 (92%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  65 reviews
Sales Rank: 340906
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 236
Shipping Weight (lbs): 4.7
Dimensions (in): 11.7 x 11.6 x 1
ISBN: 0375406344
Dewey Decimal Number: 629.4540973022
EAN: 9780375406348
ASIN: 0375406344
Publication Date: May 18, 1999
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: EX-LIBRARY; used item may have library binding and show stamps, stickers or other marks. Items not meeting quality expectations may be returned for refund.
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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
Product 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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 60 more reviews...
 What this book is about January 11, 2008
"Full Moon" is a selection of about one hundred pictures of different lunar american missions. The selection and the digital improvement has been made by Michael Light, and all has been done from an artistic perspective.
If you're looking for a very comprehensive lunar mission day-to-day, interviews with astronauts or a nice reproduction of "that" picture, this is not definitely your book.
But if you want, for a moment, walk on the moon, travel outside the Earth and dance with the stars, then buy it.
amazing photography April 1, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a beautiful book. It is a series of photos from various Apollo missions, put together in a way to illustrate a voyage from Earth to the moon & back. The photos take up whole pages, or are panorama fold-outs. The photos are crystal clear. I have seen close-ups made from these photos before, but never the originals as are in Full Moon. That's when I realized the resolution of the cameras the Apollo astronauts were using was incredible.
My only disappointment was that my copy arrived with the dustjacket all scraped up and dented, and the edges of many of the pages were mangled, so I had to return it. The book still gets 5 stars because that is no fault of the publisher, or Michael Light. I'll buy it again when I can find a good copy at a "bricks & mortar" bookstore; it's worth the extra $$.
Excellent High Resolution Print found nowhere else December 10, 2006
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
I can use "picture book" to describe Full Moon, as images contributed as the major part of this book. Don't think that this book is not worth reading, indeed, it is on the contrary, this is an extraordinary book, because of the photos.
There are a lot of astronomy books contain lots of photos, but when you read them, you would find the images are not so good at all, but not because of the photo itself, because of the low resolution. And if you are familiarize with those photos, you would immediately notice that the original photo is not so small in resolution. It is really a very bad idea for the publisher and editor to ignore the importance of image resolution.
However, when you first look into Full Moon, you will find you're getting into a different world as you are already delighted by the spectacular images of the Moon taken from Apollo Mission. Normally, owing to the technological limitation in 1960s and 1970s, all images are only mostly available as hard copy and not so high resolution. However, Project Full Moon can turn those hard copies into very high resolution images. I can even tell you that, NASA even don't have such high resolution images before.
Since these reasons, I would rank this book as my list of Top 10 Astronomy Book. If you really love astronomy, you must not miss this book, miss the extraordinary journey to the Moon
Phenomenal April 27, 2006
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
If you are looking for a book with all the same press shots you've seen a thousand times then this book isn't for you. The panoramic composits are excellent and the choice of photos is very intelligent. See what Apollo was really about in this book. The quality in terms of photo reproduction and book design is impeccable.
Beautifully Done. February 25, 2006
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
A rare glympse at other-world light and shadow phenomena presented in photographs from an exciting time in our space journey. The presentation is a beautiful reminder that we were once there and need to go back to "check on things."
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