I was 11 and we were taken to the large kindergarden room where the TV was set up. Of course it was interesting but it was also (to us kids) incredibly slow. We seemed to sit and look at the ladder for hours before anything happened. And the picture quality was, even by the standard of the time, very poor. My wife remembers teachers making jokes etc to keep the kids focussed. ("Oh! Look. Is that a moon monster?")
Despite that, it must have affected me. The following year I won a book prize and I had a choice of 'Secrets of the Sky' and 'Secrets of the Earth'. I chose the former and still have it. By 14 I had joined an astronomy club and the rest is history.
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Originally Posted by DavidU
By the way, about a year later I was the first ( as far as I know) Aussie to hold some moon rock in my hand. The moon rock samples were to be picked up from Clayton by the Monash Geo team( Prof F.Beavis from memory). Needless to say I was thrilled.
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Sorry to be a party pooper but I know that there was an Australian geologist, Bruce Chappell, on the team in America that worked on the moon rocks returned by the Apollo missions. I imagine he would have had his hands on them before any material was sent to Australia. Bruce is an expert in XRF spectroscopy which would have been used to determine the elemental composition of the rocks. He is a visiting fellow here at Wollongong and has commented on how distinctive the moon rocks are; they even
look quite different to terrestial rocks.