Another eclipse photo and a most rare one.

While shepherding a van, small truck, and two Dodge motor homes from Houston to 345 miles south of Mexico City for the March 1970 eclipse, I arranged for the crew to have lunch in my old hometown of Freer, Texas.

While the crew ate enchiladas at Peck’s Cafe, I drove the van out to visit my father-in-law, Mr. John Watson. He lived on a little oil lease at the edge of town.

Mr. Watson was a Renaissance Man but one without access to much in-depth conversation. He liked for me to visit and he asked tons of technical questions and he always understood what I was talking about.

He also liked to irritate his wife, Woodie.

Several days after I had been there -- there is a point to this -- an old oil-field friend was visiting him and in the course of conversation, Mr. Watson said, "Well, Kenneth David was through here last week with a bunch of NASA people. They were going down to Mexico to take pictures of the moon."

Woodie, never passing up an opportunity to correct him, called out from the kitchen, "No, John, you old fool. He was going to Mexico to take pictures of the SUN!"

Mr. Watson said very slowly, "Well...it is going to be a solar eclipse so it will be pretty hard NOT to take pictures of the moon."

As usual, he was baiting her.

So, yes, all solar eclipse photos show the moon.

Or do they?

Today's image shows just another diamond ring effect during a solar eclipse. But that is not the moon masking the sun.

What is it?

When Apollo 12, with Pete Conrad, Alan Bean, and Dick Gordon, was in lunar/earth transit after the nation's second lunar landing, they saw this eclipse.

The sun was being eclipsed not by the moon but by Earth!

This is one of the rarest eclipse photos, and was acquired (by humans) just once.

In all of us, there is a time when practicality and scientific thought should just give way to the spirit and emotions. This photo has less scientific merit than a similar one I would make just four months later from a Mexican mountain top.

I have to admit, however, that I would be no more than a scientific drone -- a technological drudge -- had I not been moved the first time I saw this image. I have almost every photo taken in this series.

This image was taken November 24, 1969.

Just five months earlier, the Apollo 11 mission had landed the first man (an engineer) on the moon. Man would observe Earthrise from another heavenly body.

While Armstrong and Aldrin had been on the lunar surface, Mike Collins was left in the command service module orbiting the moon. The two guys on the lunar surface might as well have been on Earth for all the help they could have been to Collins.

Mike Collins was alone.

Mike Collins was as alone as a human had ever been.

He was by himself -- 240,000 miles from home. THAT is isolation!

After he returned to Earth, he received a letter that read – "There is a quality of aloneness that those who have not experienced it cannot know – to be alone and then return to one’s fellow man once more." It was from Charles A. Lindbergh.

Yes, NASA did such things -- once -- and the accomplishments were not always measured in mere mechanical dimensions.

Dimensions of the spirit do not exist -- because the spirit has no bounds. In the measurements of the imagination, there are no rulers, no gauges, no limits.

The last image tomorrow is also one-of-a-kind.