Saturday, October 17, 2015

Some of my favorite Apollo missions archive photos

I've been going through the newly released Apollo Moon Mission photo albums, and I've downloaded and saved about 315 pictures so far.  Initially, I made a mistake of just saving the photos using the NASA file numbers.  For example, this is photo #21062657803_1b5573f7dc_o.jpg:


I'd downloaded about 50 pictures when I suddenly realized that if I wanted to mention them in a comment, I had forgotten in which album the photo was located.  And there is no way to tell from their photo number what mission or album the picture is from.  I couldn't tell anyone where I got it or where they could find a full size copy.  Duh!

So, I started methodically going through albums to try to identify where I'd found those 50 pictures, so that I could rename them.  The photo above is one that took a long time to locate.  I knew it wasn't from the Apollo 11, 12, or 14 missions, since they didn't take a "moon buggy" along until Apollo 15.  Finally, by using TinEye, I found it was from album Apollo 15 Magazine 82/SS.

The photo below is a favorite from the first mission to land on the moon: Apollo 11.  There are 8 albums of photos from Apollo 11.  The picture below is from the Apollo 11 Magazine 40/S album.  It's the 8th picture I saved from that album, so my photo number is: A11-M40S-08.jpg.


I cropped the above picture to create the picture below as photo #A11-M40S-08A.jpg:


Here's a cropped version of a picture the astronauts took during the Apollo 16 mission.  Interestingly, they got dirt on the lens and nearly all of the photos in magazine 114/B show the smudge:.


Here's a cropped shot from the Apollo 16 mission after they put in magazine 117/F and cleaned the lens (or maybe it was shot by the 2nd astronaut who didn't have smudge on his camera lens):


Here's a cropped favorite from the Apollo 17 mission, film magazine #134/B:


Below is another shot from the same film magazine, but this shot shows the astronaut holding the corner of the flag to straighten it out.  The lower gravity on the moon apparently was enough to cause the flag to straighten out all by itself.


When I mentioned this collection of photo albums on a Facebook page, it didn't take long before someone wrote: "Sure. Kubrick was such a genius."  I think he was joking, but I had been wondering how long it would take before a "Moon Landing Truther" would argue that all the pictures are faked.  And I was also wondering if there was anything in the pictures that might convince a "Moon Landing Truther" that we actually did go to the moon.  Probably not.  But, would Stanley Kubrick's special effects experts have created dozens and dozens of pictures that look nearly the same?  Would he have created smudged pictures and partial pictures from the end of a film roll?  Looking through the albums, I could not help but think how the astronauts weren't taking time to compose artistic photographs.  They were photographing everything, and the result was often a dozen pictures of the same rock from slightly different angles.  A "Truther" might argue that a picture was faked, but it gets pretty hard to say a picture is a fake when it is one in a series of thirty shots taken from the moon buggy as they drive across the moonscape.  Where on earth would anyone find such a landscape and such a sky?        
 

1 comment:

  1. "If you believe, they put a man on the moon." (R.E.M. "Man on the Moon)

    Then it stands to reason, If you DON'T believe, they DIDN'T put a man on the Moon.

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