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    The only camera to come back from the moon will be auctioned in March

    The only camera to come back from the moon will be auctioned in March

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    Moon

    The astronauts of the Apollo missions took 70mm Hasselblad cameras with them when they landed on the moon. The stunning pictures these cameras enabled them to take are carefully cataloged and available for all to see online, but you'll have to look harder if you want to find one of the cameras themselves. Of 14 cameras sent to the moon between 1969 and 1972, the majority were abandoned due to weight concerns. Only one made it back to Earth — and it's set to go to auction on March 21st.

    The camera was used by astronaut Jim Irwin to take 299 pictures of the moon's surface during the Apollo 15 mission in 1971, and is expected to fetch between 150,000 and 200,000 euros ($200,000–270,000) at auction in Vienna. The Hasselblad currently belongs to an Italian collector, and is stamped with "38" — the same number that appears in the pictures shot on the moon. It's "100-percent proof," Peter Coeln, owner of the Austrian auction house holding the sale says, "that this camera is the real thing and really was on the moon."