While growing up in the great white north, there wasn't a lot of media input on manned space activities. Television was limited to just two channels one in each of our national languages. However somehow at a very young age (during the J series missions I imagine) I gained an interest in space flight. I was three years old when Apollo 11 landed.on the moon and six and a half when Apollo 17 completed the series. I can still remember watching the launch of Apollo Soyuz in July 1975 and hearing the commentator announcing "liftoff of the last Apollo!". Even at nine years old, I felt a negative jolt at hearing those words even though I didn 't fully appreciate the significance of that statement.
I am not trained in aerospace engineering or geology or anything of that sort but I do have a passion for these topics as they relate to Apollo specifically and human space flight in general. My past innvolvment in the ALSJ has related to scanning or conversion of key documents to PDF like the Apollo USGS Professional papers and various checklists etc.
Currently I am dabbling in the arrea of "amature Apollo lunar photo cartography". I have embarked on a project that innvolves leveraging the wonderful Lunar Reconnaissance Obriter Camera (LROC) imagery to produce a series of planimetric photomaps that will document in great detail the Apollo activity at each station and along each traverse route, across all of the Apollo missions.
Although I have obtained LROC source data to cover all Apollo missions, I am begining this project with Apollo 16 (long story). Maps for Station 4, 5, are complete and should appear soon, with much more to come. I appreciate any feed back that might come my way in this regard. I can be reached at the email address at the bottom. My motto in this effort is "Let's get it right!".
In producing these maps, I find myself neccessarily "deep diving" into every detail of the misisions and thus finding interesting details which I hope to share as appropriate, along the way.
It's a real pleasure to be able to help out with the ALSJ. To quote Neil Armstrong (during Apollo 11), "It's an honor to be able to participate here".
Brian McInall
15 September, 2014
bjmcinall@gmail.com