'The Feather and the Hammer', by Alan Bean, 1986, produced by Gemini workshops in an edition of 650.
One of twelve ‘Moonwalkers’, Apollo 12’s Alan Bean (1932-2018) resigned from NASA in 1981 to devote himself to art and share his impressions of the Moon in this new career. His works, either painted from memory, or inspired by his fellow astronauts’ experiences and the TV footage and photographs of the time, form unique testimonies of the unprecedented exploration of an alien world as seen through an artist’s eyes.
Here, Bean conveys both the preparedness that went into the expeditions and the sense of humour of the individuals taking part in these. Each mission’s payload was limited to the bare minimum, and astronauts were allowed very few, small and light, personal items on board. During one Extra Vehicular Activity (moonwalk) spent collecting rock samples and solar wind particle measurements, Apollo 15 Commander Dave Scott stood in front of the Lunar Module’s Data Acquisition Camera, and performed the action best described in his own words: ‘Well, in my left hand, I have a feather; in my right hand, a hammer. And I guess one of the reasons we got here today was because of a gentleman named Galileo, a long time ago, who made a rather significant discovery about falling objects in gravity fields. And we thought where would be a better place to confirm his findings than on the Moon. [pause] And so we thought we'd try it here for you. The feather happens to be, appropriately, a falcon feather for our Falcon. And I'll drop the two of them here and, hopefully, they'll hit the ground at the same time. [pause] How about that! [pause]. Which proves that Mr Galileo was correct in his findings!’ [Apollo 15 Lunar surface journal transcript, NASA, https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a15/a15.clsout3.html acecssed 30.11.2018]
This experiment refers to Galileo’s discovery, some three-and-a-half centuries earlier, that ‘gravity pulls all bodies equally regardless of their weight’, thus revealing the continued relevance of early astronomical discoveries well into the 20th century.