The mystery of the image of an astronaut cleaned by Rudesind

Dave Lebling · 02 Jul 2010, 17:22 · from 2010-July.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: dlebling at hyraxes.com (Dave Lebling)
Date: Fri, 2 Jul 2010 13:22:39 -0400
Subject: (urth) The mystery of the image of an astronaut cleaned by
	Rudesind
In-Reply-To: <4C2E1B1B.9060107 at gmail.com>
References: <SNT123-W186492E2214C7539E99F09CFCA0 at phx.gbl>
	<4C2A8E44.5040704 at verizon.net> <4C2BFC40.6060404 at verizon.net>
	<4C2C04EF.2010203 at io.com> <4C2C0655.4010507 at verizon.net>
	<4C2C2011.9060307 at gmail.com> <4C2CB072.20808 at io.com>
	<2dc2f9da5b8a851b52b3d871d3ac10ee.squirrel at brunians.org>
	<AANLkTikC4Thq8kjaAkgzBli5_YF2QRuC2FvqKZk5Fl8d at mail.gmail.com>
	<1a4c459d00e6bfae603d8d424a281478.squirrel at brunians.org>
	<AANLkTikWDg_uCKgdT-_tCOkhsPUxytED0Oe7IC2RRFeT at mail.gmail.com>
	<64a5f0ccd7ad8135cc880d55f01d35d7.squirrel at brunians.org>
	<4C2CC5FB.4090304 at gmail.com>
	<65fa45fb235122f7a2217875a2e6addb.squirrel at brunians.org>
	<A9A0AEF3-B283-4660-98BA-9E3700100817 at liftingfaces.com>
	<4C2D4AA7.90707 at verizon.net>
	<b911e4d19bf4a5c6e18f6b7978a18f34.squirrel at brunians.org>
	<80e082d548cd62953cc58ba97ddefc59.squirrel at brunians.org>
	<4C2D5339.7040508 at verizon.net> <4C2D6FF2.4000805 at io.com>
	<4C2DEFD0.7010805 at verizon.net> <4C2DFD00.3050609 at gmail.com>
	<4C2E0B7B.7000605 at io.com> <4C2E12BF.6050608 at verizon.net>
	<4C2E1B1B.9060107 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <AANLkTil40N7BGHwxW6zWsrTq7fxfGcCunXHhGBo0BOiu at mail.gmail.com>

I'm really fairly amazed at the level of nit-pickery over this question. Let
us cast our minds back to the thrilling days of yesteryear (the late 70s),
when Wolfe wrote SotT. There was no internet on which you could look up all
the thousands of then-unreleased Apollo program pictures, there were a few
places you could find pictures in hardcopy (Life -- already moribund,
National Geographic, a few coffee table books, etc.). As an SF fan, I'm sure
he had resources such as the F&SF cover -- or not, he may not be a pack rat.

It seems quite obvious that the description he wrote is based on his
memories of various photos and paintings he had actually seen, but he very
likely wasn't staring at an actual photo when he wrote the words. Even if he
was, who's to say he might not have taken auctorial liberties with what he
saw?

I know that after many re-readings of SotT, my minds-eye image of the
"canonical" Apollo photograph is now the (non-existent) one Wolfe described.

-- David Lebling, aka vizcacha

2010/7/2 Ant?nio Pedro Marques <entonio at gmail.com>

> David Stockhoff wrote (02-07-2010 17:24):
>
>  Yeah, except it's not rising over anyone's shoulder.
>>
>
> You draw a vertical line, it *is* over the shoulder. If you then picture
> the planet rising in an arc, clockwise, it doesn't sound far off. But here
> my understanding of english may be just deficient.
>
>
>  I suppose I should clarify that I think it's plain that "visor of gold"
>> doesn't mean that at all. It just needs to be dominated almost entirely
>> by a solar/moonscape reflection.
>>
>
> The reflection on the visor, in that picture, looks like it's something
> relfected on a gilded surface. The black part could be interpreted as
> shadow. In fact, if I didn't know better, I might also guess the visor's
> surface was golden.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20100702/3b650299/attachment.htm>

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net