Full Moon: Apollo Mission Photographs of the Lunar Landscape, an exhibition of rarely seen photographic prints from NASA's Apollo missions to the moon, guest curated by artist and landscape photographer Michael Light, is on view at the American Museum of Natural History's Rose Center for Earth and Space. Full Moon presents over 75 photographic images of impressive scale and quality, creating a fresh understanding of some of the century's most dramatic events in space exploration. The exhibition conveys the impressive nature of the Apollo journeys and the moon's vastness.

Full Moon inaugurated new exhibition space in the Museum's acclaimed Frederick Phineas and Sandra Priest Rose Center for Earth and Space when the exhibition opened in March 2000. The exhibition's stunning images are closely related to the scientific content of this recently opened innovative exhibition, research, and educational facility.

Full Moon comes to the Museum after receiving international acclaim in London, Amsterdam, Madrid, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and is accompanied by Light's photographic book, FULL MOON, released in seven languages worldwide.

Inspired by desert landscape photographs he shot in the American Southwest, California-based artist Michael Light turned his attention to the moon's topography in 1996, gaining access to the film masters from NASA's image archives of the 1967-1972 Apollo missions. Over the next four years, Light carefully selected powerful images from the over 32,000 photographs taken by the astronauts on the journeys to the moon. Using digital scanning techniques to retain the original quality of the masters, Light then worked with the digital image files for over a year in order to create exhibition-quality prints of unusually high resolution and large format.

Full Moon is divided into three principal sections, "The Voyage," "In Orbit Around the Moon," and "The Lunar Surface," that give earthbound viewers a sense of the astronauts' experiences and create a deeper appreciation for the grandeur of the Apollo missions and of the moon itself.

In "The Voyage," Light's images reveal the nature of the journey to the moon. The astronauts and their spacecraft are seen traveling away from Earth, and a number of images record the Earth as it is seen from space.

"In Orbit Around the Moon" reveals how stunning the lunar surface appeared to NASA's astronauts as they gazed over a cratered moonscape from a viewpoint closer than any humans had experienced before.

"The Lunar Surface" includes images taken by astronauts standing on the moon's surface, revealing an unknown world the way the astronauts saw it—desolate and bizarre, yet strangely beautiful. As Light indicates, the Apollo photographs "radically change the way humans conceive of themselves in the universe. We thought Apollo was about going to the moon—and it certainly was—but its most enduring legacies are also all about the Earth."

The Rose Center setting provides scientific background about the moon's formation and existence, enriching the viewer's experience of Light's photographs. In the Gottesman Hall of Planet Earth and on the Heilbrunn Cosmic Pathway, for example, panels explain how the moon formed four and a half billion years ago and a bronze moon model allows visitors to see and feel in three dimensions the lunar surface depicted in the prints. Lastly, by stepping on the digital scale beside the moon model, visitors can gain an appreciation of the weight change experienced by the astronauts as they walked on the moon.

This exhibition celebrating the pioneering spirit of the Apollo space missions is made possible through the generous support of Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson.