{"id":1077,"date":"2026-04-13T15:27:36","date_gmt":"2026-04-13T15:27:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/?p=1077"},"modified":"2026-04-13T15:27:37","modified_gmt":"2026-04-13T15:27:37","slug":"the-moon-and-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/andrew-may.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/the-moon-and-me\/","title":{"rendered":"The Moon and me"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Andrew<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

As you’ll see in a moment, I’ve been fascinated by the Moon since childhood, but the picture above shows some of my more recent writings on the subject. There’s my book The Telescopic Tourist’s Guide to the Moon<\/a>, written in 2017 for the Patrick Moore Practical Astronomy Series from Springer. A couple of years later, my very first contribution to How It Works<\/em> magazine was an 8-page feature “Science Secrets of Apollo 11” in the July 2019 issue, to mark the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing. And now the latest issue of the same magazine has a cover feature by me, “Return to the Moon”, to coincide with this month’s Artemis II mission around the Moon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a general rule, magazine features like this don’t include personal anecdotes from the author, but the latter is an exception. When I told the editor that I avidly followed Artemis II’s predecessor, Apollo 8, back in December 1968 (the month of my 11th birthday) he suggested that I put something in about it. So I inserted a small inset image of a treasured souvenir of mine – a card I got back from NASA in response to a fan letter I sent immediately after the Apollo 8 flight. But as I admitted in the caption to the image, “the astronaut autographs are unfortunately machine-printed”!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"NASA<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The images sent back by the Artemis II astronauts were so spectacular I couldn’t resist putting together the following short video, with electronic soundtrack based on Schubert’s aptly named song “To the Moon”:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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