"Every time I looked out the window at the Earth as it went away, the moon just got bigger," Bean said. "That was the most amazing part of the flight for me. Just looking out and seeing the moon and saying, 'I'm really around this 2,000-mile diameter moon up here. There's the Earth over there, 240,000 miles away.'

"If I looked inside the spacecraft, it looked just like the simulator. When I got out on the moon, it looked a lot like the places in Hawaii or Iceland we had visited that had volcanic flows that were like the moon. … But boy, looking out the window, it was a whole new dimension.

"When you look back at the Earth and it's 240,000 miles away and it's as big as your thumb — you have never seen anything like that. You've imagined it. But there's a difference between imagining and actually being there and seeing it and realizing you're that far away from everybody else."

Artist's eye

Following Apollo 12 in November 1969, Bean continued with NASA, serving as commander of Skylab II and the head of the Astronaut Candidate Operation and Training Group. In 1981, Bean retired with a different mission in mind: sharing his experiences as an astronaut through art.

Bean always had an interest in art; he just didn't realize it until his days as a test pilot.

"Somehow during that time I got the urge to paint," he said. "I had always visited art galleries, and I thought, 'Well I can do that.' So I enrolled in night school and took drawing and watercolor and things like that, and I liked it. But it was just a hobby. I never thought that I would do it as a profession."

As one of only 12 men to walk on the moon, Bean feels an obligation to share their experiences.

"I think of myself as telling the special stories that I know as a person who walked on the moon and from knowing all the others that walked on the moon and hearing their stories firsthand," he said. "I think my job now is to try to tell these stories in fine art so that after we're gone these stories that would otherwise be lost will remain for future generations.

"I'm the only person that knows all this stuff, all these stories," Bean said. "That's the reason I left NASA. I was training to be the shuttle commander. I loved being an astronaut. … But I'm the only one of the 12 people who've walked on the moon that wants to tell these stories in a fine arts way."

During the past 28 years, Bean has painted some 170 images. And one of the ways he's found to share those images is through books, though that had to wait until the right collaborator came along — a collaborator by the name of Andrew Chaikin.

Collaborative minds