I have never seen Armstrong wearing anything other than the JBC with straight end pieces.
Here is the first image in the thread.
Here is an image I was forwarded a few months ago that I posted earlier. Here it is enlarged and I clearly see the straight end piece.
Here are a couple of photos of Apollo 12 and Sklab 3 astronaut Alan Bean and his golden Speedmaster. The photos were taken around the time of the Skylab 3 mission, pre-flight. The watch was sold at auction in April 2015 for $50,000.
I'm not a Hodinkee regular but glad I checked in today. As a 1675 GMT owner this is nice to see.
Here is a nice clip they are spotlighting showing really nice footage of Mitchell prepping his Rolex GMT and another unidentified watch during his suiting up on launch day. The watch action starts at 4:50 minutes into the clip.
I'd always wondered what happens to those manual-wind Speedmasters after arrival on the ISS. Now I know. They remain with the flight suits, on board the Soyuz spacecraft that brought them there. The photo was taken on July 30th, 2016.
image credit: NASA
I don't want to get booed off the stage here by posting my images again regarding astronauts and their Speedmaster eye candy but you are correct the manned spaceflight image gallery is a treasure trove of Speedmaster goodness.
As far as what Armstrong is timing goes maybe he has a bet with Collins on how long it will take Buzz to piss him off based on their somewhat contentious relationship at this point in history or he's timing how many pictures of him looking at a rock could be taken is 7 seconds.
However, is it known what was at the root of this contentious relationship? Was it professional or personal or is that one and both the same thing at that time of their lives? Did they resolve these issues in time? Just curious. 😎
I have been looking for better images of the fabric straps worn by Leonov and Kubasov during the ASTP mission for sometime now. Here are two new ones that were passed onto me last night.
The straps appear to be plain old elastic. Guess who's has been searching the web for vintage Soviet era powder blue elastic for the last few hours? No luck so far so I think a trip to the Italian Fabric Hut is in order tomorrow.
I'm puzzled by the indicated times on Leonov's Speedmasters, as the minute hands appear to be off by about 15 minutes. I know there are some time zones split into 1/2-hours from UTC, but 15 minutes???
Maybe this....
What appears to us to be a 15 minute change between the two watches could actually be a 45 minute GMT offset after reading this.
"While most time zones differ from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) by a number of full hours, there are also a few time zones with both 30-minute and 45-minute offsets."
After looking at this image again I see what appears to be close to a 30 minute difference between the watches. The hand to the right is either Brand, Slayton, or Stafford and the watch is mostly likely set to Houston time. It is the same time seen on Leonov's signing hand watch 2:25. The other two are off by almost 30 minutes. The Soviets could possibly be setting their watch to a time zone that has either a 30 or 45 minute offset. That's the best I can come up with so far.
