At a recent press conference commemorating the 30th anniversary of the moon landing, the now-elderly astronauts from the historic Apollo 11 mission gathered to bemoan the current state of the space program. Where are the promised space stations? When will we send a man to Mars? What happened to the boundless enthusiasm that allowed humanity to accomplish the inconceivable in the first place? Cash flow is certainly a problem, yet funding is only one facet of NASA's struggle for the stars. If anything, the greatest failing of the space program today seems to be a lack of vision, the "whys" rather than the "hows" and "whats" of traveling through space. Full Moon, however, makes a compelling argument that space travel should be pursued not just for scientific purposes, but also for aesthetic reasons. The book, a collection of mostly never-published color and black-and-white photos taken on various Apollo missions, is a stunning reminder of how much power these images must have possessed in 1969. Though NASA has negatives for tens of thousands of moon-landing photographs, most are carefully hidden away in storage. The 129 photos in Full Moon were transferred electronically to ensure maximum resolution, then arranged by photographer Michael Light into a chronological photo essay that begins with a two-page spread of an apocalyptic ball of fire from 1969 and ends with a shot of the ocean taken from a floating command capsule in 1973. From fire to water, the bookends form a nice metaphor for the planet's creation, with the rise of humanity not serving as its focus but sandwiched in the middle, a documentation of progress not evolutionary but revolutionary, and now, years later, simply beautiful.