Buzz Aldrin walking next to the golden leg of the LM Eagle, 16-24 July 1969

Vintage chromogenic print on fiber-based paper, printed 1969, numbered "NASA AS11-40-5902" (NASA MSC) in red in top margin, with "A KODAK PAPER" watermark on verso, 25,4 x 20,3 cm

Walking beyond the north strut of the LM Eagle at Tranquility Base, Buzz Aldrin is surrounded by a vacuum atmosphere in the one sixth gravity environment.
In this silent world he can hear only the crackling of communications, the sounds of his life support system and the echo of his breathing in his helmet.
A tiny image of Armstrong taking the photograph can be seen in his reflective faceplate.

“I quickly discovered that I felt balanced comfortably upright only when I was tilted slightly forward. I also felt a bit disorientated – on the Earth when one looks at the horizon, it appears flat; on the Moon, so much smaller than the Earth and quite without high terrain, the horizon in all directions visibly curved away from us.”
Buzz Aldrin (from his 1973 book Return to Earth).

“We felt very comfortable. It was, in fact, in our view both preferable to weightlessness and to the Earth’s gravity.”
Neil Armstrong

Literature:
LIFE, 11 August 1969; TIME, 8 August 1969, pg. 23; Moon: Man’s Greatest Adventure, Thomas, ed., pg. 196; Apollo Expeditions to the Moon (NASA SP-350), Cortright, ed., pg. 202.