Jud Partin

Long post, but this one is important to me so I hope you stick it out! In January I reached out to Artemis II Commander @astro_reid with a simple ask- was he open to capturing the moon like I do for my colorful moon photos during the flyby? He humbly agreed, and we worked out a plan to incorporate into the photos captured as the crew approached the moon. The premise was simple- just capture enough photos in a burst to allow for image stacking to improve image fidelity, potentially to reveal color no human has ever captured. What he brought back was nothing short of magnificent. When I initially stacked the raw photos, it exceeded my expectations by far. The color came right out of the seemingly gray images, and showed details I've never seen before. It's possible nobody has. The lack of atmosphere meant a lot of color normally absorbed and scattered was present, so even the "near side" features looked exotic and unfamiliar. This view of the moon from an alien perspective made the usually-familiar lunar surface fresh and exciting, and the color we were able to resolve gave us valuable insight to the complex geological history of it's battered surface. Then, I faced a bit of a moral dilemma. I wanted people to be able to own these images in print- but I wouldn't feel right to profit off of them. As an active NASA astronaut, Reid certainly can't. He took these photos as part of a taxpayer-funded mission. If I couldn't split profits with him I didn't see a way to do this ethically, so I decided to release the images initially with no print offering, despite many requests!  Then, it clicked. After doing some research- I decided that I should do a print sale where the profits go 100% to charity. That way I can make prints available, do some good in the world, and it doesn't feel like an ethical conflict. ​I'm pleased to share my first EVER entirely-for-charity print release. ​ At the end of this sale all proceeds with be donated to UT MD Anderson Cancer Center. It feels fitting. I will follow up in a future post with a receipt from the donation, so you know how much we were able to donate. When I released this to my email subscribers only, we were already able to raise around $15k. Amazing! The limited edition fine art print is now publicly available, you can grab one of them at the link in my bio (also linked further in the thread) for a short time. Thank you for helping me do something good with my platform. Seriously... it feels amazing.