Shooting the Moon: Photos of the Lunar Surface and Beyond
By Richard Green | Still Pictures Unit
On August 26, 1966 an image graced the front page of the New York Times under the headline, “How the Earth Looks from the Moon.” The image was of such low quality that the grey sphere which all of mankind calls home was barely recognizable. Nevertheless, the photograph was remarkable. For the first time, humans looked beyond the lunar horizon and saw Earth. The image came from NASA’s Lunar Orbiter project and was dubbed by some as the “Picture of the Century.” Now, over 50 years later, the photographs have been fully restored thanks to the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP), giving people a new look at an old image.
Between August 1966 and August 1967, NASA launched a series of five Lunar Orbiter Missions in order to find a landing spot for future manned missions to the moon. The Lunar Orbiter was an unmanned probe that essentially operated as flying photographic laboratory. The spacecraft was equipped to photograph the moon on 70 mm film, develop the film, and scan the film in small segments. The scans were then converted to a radio signal which was sent back to Earth.
Upon receiving the transmission, NASA technicians back on Earth saved the image data in two separate methods:
In one method, the signal was converted and played through a kinescope machine, a rudimentary means of recording, in which the image was played through a television tube and a motion picture camera pointed at the screen recorded the image on 35 mm film. The strips of film were then cut and reassembled by hand to form the complete image.
Since the 70 mm film on the spacecraft was a negative, the 35 mm film recording on the ground produced a positive image, not suitable for producing photographic prints. To enable the production of prints, operators then took another photograph of the assembled strips to produce a comprehensive negative image of the lunar surface, from which prints could be made for scientific analysis of landing sites. This process was successful in determining a landing spot for the Apollo missions, yet ultimately created low resolution photographs with minimal detail.
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