Follow Up: More High Quality Apollo-11 Footage
March 6th, 2009
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As a follow up to this post, in which I posted some of the high quality 16mm footage of the Apollo-11 landing, this video represents the remainder of the full motion movie of the Apollo-11 EVA.
This is the last of the “full motion” 16MM footage of the Apollo-11 moon landing. It shows Neil Armstrong collecting the contingency lunar samples shortly after he first set foot on the moon. Buzz Aldrin remains in the lunar module and is filming out the window. The motion looks slightly choppy because the camera was set to 12 frames per second, enough to record descent motion, but not perfectly smooth.
The sample was collected first in case an emergency or unplanned circumstances forced Apollo-11 to leave the lunar surface earlier than expected. Buzz Aldrin operated the television camera transmitter and kept the LM ready for a quick launch, if necessary, as Neil Armstrong took the first samples. After the end of this clip, Aldrin joined Armstrong on the lunar surface. The 16mm Data Acquisition Camera continued to record, but Buzz Aldrin set the speed down to one frame per second. This was necessary to conserve the remaining film, which would last only minutes at full speed. Thus, after this clip, all further DAC footage is more time-lapse than full motion.
What I find interesting is that due to the angle and lighting, you can clearly see Neil Armstrong’s face in the spacesuit. Most photographs taken on the moon are taken by other astronauts at roughly the same level as the helmet of the astronaut being photographed and usually with the sun behind them. The sun visor of the helment is often down and therefore all you see is a reflection.
It’s not possible to make out much of the expression on Armstrong’s face (at least not in this video version), but if you look closely, when he leans in and looks down, you can see the black and white stripes of his “Snoopy Cap” – The black and white cap that contained the communications headset. It would be interesting to see if there are any higher resolution scans of individual frames, because I don’t think I’ve ever seen quite this kind of photo of an astronaut on the moon.
This entry was posted on Friday, March 6th, 2009 at 3:58 pm and is filed under Conspiracy Theories, Good Science, History, Space, media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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March 6th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
update: I didn’t have the audio track for this initially on the video, but I updated it using the NASA-hosted version of this (which is lower quality). The audio may be off by a half second or so, but it should be pretty close to synchronized correctly.
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March 6th, 2009 at 9:26 pm
Very cool. I was unaware that such footage existed before the previous post. Too bad there isn’t more.
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March 7th, 2009 at 12:50 am
It’s too bad NASA didn’t arrange to have the whole mission recorded with high quality color footage. It would had added a little bit of weight and expense to fly a full length of movie film and everything. Looking back it seems like it would be worth it given that this was a stupendous event in history that will remembered for perhaps centuries.
But then I guess there is the flip side which is that we’re lucky they documented it at all, even if it is stop motion film and low quality television. Plenty of historic events never got onto film. I don’t think Yuri Gagarin’s first flight into space was documented on film.
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March 7th, 2009 at 12:54 am
Over from Bad Astronomy. Many thanks for posting this.
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March 7th, 2009 at 5:37 am
…also visiting from BA. Great work on the videos! I also wish there was more of this stuff. What really pisses me off is that after you watch it on youtube, it offers you 100s of clip from the hoaxnutjobs…
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March 9th, 2009 at 6:27 am
I’m not sure about higher resolution scans but there are a number of images of Apollo astronauts with the visor up on the moon:
http://whizzospace.com/face/face.htm
Jack Schmitt was the most often photographed:
http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a17/a17schmitt.face.jpg
Buzz Aldrins face is visible in one of the most famous images from the moon but its not immediately obvious:
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/AS11-40-5875.jpg
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April 5th, 2010 at 8:37 pm
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