"I will really feel like celebrating when they are here on earth again"

I'm perennially fascinated by our human longing to see vastly, and the artist's interest in recording that longing. See here for another post on this.

Today, the New York Times has collected some incredible images of July 20, 1969 in honor of the 50 year anniversary of mankind's first walk on the moon. It is really moving to see and read of the exhilaration that people were experiencing that day. This woman's postcard, above, is one example: "The moon's surface is so interesting. I can't wait to see color pictures in Life magazine etc.... What a fantastic thing to see on live TV!... What a day!"

Someone else wrote in about what it was like to be a little boy at the time: "I was only 7, but I did not sleep the whole week! My eyes were trained on Neil Armstrong the whole time."


Photographs taken by the then-22-year-old photojournalist David Burnett; more about his prescient choice to take shots of the onlookers, here.