Avi: The other amazing thing you saw was on your EVA. It was the first interplanetary EVA? Al: Yes. And as a matter of fact I was further out from Earth than any of the others. I still have the record for the furthest out EVA. A little about 50,000 miles this side of the moon when I did that. It was kind of unique because as you know when the spacecraft comes back from the moon it doesn’t come straight back - it loops around. It makes a big arc path to get back to the earth because of the motion of the moon and the earth and all the rest of it. So we were off the center-line of the moon and the earth and I could see the both of them at the same time. Pretty spectacular - you look at the moon and there’s nothing there except craters and ancient lava flows and that kind of thing, then you look at the Earth and it’s very dynamic, it’s got cloud cover and all the stuff that we know about. The difference between the two is pretty dramatic. Spectacular sight, I have to say from out there, especially when you’re standing in the middle of a spacesuit with a bubble helmet and you can kind of look around. Jim Irwin was standing in the hatch at the time watching me and making sure that everything was OK. The moon was behind him, in fact there’s a painting at the Smithsonian that Pierre Mion did of my EVA since I wasn’t allowed to take a camera out, and it shows Jim Irwin standing in the hatch with the moon behind him and I was reflected in his visor. Kind of a neat painting.
Avi: Even if you had a camera would you have been able to capture the earth and the moon together? Al: No, I couldn’t do that because they were too far apart for that but that really wasn’t the purpose. I really wanted to take a camera out to photograph the outside of the service module and we found some things where photographs would have been helpful. We found that there was some scorching from the reaction control system jets. The mapping camera had stuck out and wouldn’t retract. Some pictures and all of that stuff would have been useful for the engineers back in Houston. And I kind of sensed that there might be things like that I would really like to take pictures of but not the earth and the moon because I’d already done that when I was in lunar orbit. https://medium.com/learning-for-life/the-loneliest-human-in-the-universe-bb9e2935ae7d