The only man between here and the moon capable of pulling off a rocket ship patterned suit, four gold rings, American flag socks, and a double watch combo is Buzz Aldrin, 89. Aldrin was one of eight Apollo astronauts to attend the 115th Explorers Club Annual Dinner March 16. The dinner also celebrated the 50 year anniversary of the moon landing on July 20, 1969, by Aldrin and the late Neil Armstrong who died in 2012. Aldrin and his astronaut brethren were photographed in New York by Felix Kunze whose composite image rocketed to the top of Reddit Sunday evening.
“The import of this whole situation really only dawned on me after I had photographed eight of them and then realized that I had gotten every Apollo astronaut in attendance. I really didn’t think it was going to happen,” Kunze told me.
Kunze has photographed the event over the past five years. The dinner features a congregation of some of the top scientific minds around the world who dine on exotic dishes like deep-fried cockroaches, tarantulas, and scorpions, Kunze added. More than 1,700 Explorer’s Club members attended the dinner, space.com reported.
The photo of the astronauts, which has since collected more than 84,000 votes and nearly 2,000 comments on Reddit’s r/space community, was not difficult to capture, Kunze said.
“People often assume that when I photograph someone like this that there’s a lengthy process of getting them to be comfortable, but I don’t really approach it that way. These guys have been photographed over and over and over, and in this case, their individual poses were not as important as the sum of the parts that would make the final photograph,” he said. “I often say that the best time to take a portrait is in the first two minutes or after a couple of hours. In the first two minutes, my subjects don’t really have a chance to even be uncomfortable.”
The men in the image, from left to right, are Charlie Duke (Apollo 16), Aldrin (Apollo 11), Walter Cunningham (Apollo 7), Al Worden (Apollo 15), Rusty Schweickart (Apollo 9), Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17), Michael Collins (Apollo 11), and Fred Haise (Apollo 13). As one perceptive Reddit user pointed out, astronaut Jim Lovell, who commanded the Apollo 13 mission, was not in attendance this year.
