I've been imagining what it would be like to go to the Moon ever since 1961 when I was five years old, staring at the artists' conceptions in my childhood space books. When Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders became the first humans to actually go there, during Christmas week of 1968, I was a 12-year-old space fanatic camped out in front of the TV with models of the spacecraft I'd built from kits, maps of the Moon, and articles about the flight — my own personal mission control.
For me, the highlight of the 20 hours Apollo 8 spent in lunar orbit on Christmas Eve came when Borman and his crew made two TV broadcasts with their small onboard black-and-white camera. I was absolutely mesmerized by the images of craters gliding slowly past the spacecraft's windows. I loved their fuzzy, almost dreamlike quality; somehow that fit the momentousness of the event and the almost unimaginable distance between the three Moon voyagers and all of us on their home planet.
