NASA re-creates iconic Apollo 8 'Earthrise' 45 years later

Cybertrash · Dec 21, 2013

TheToadMen said:
BTW: the colour image by William Anders is the famous one, but the first shot was made on B&W film by Frank Borman.

View attachment 78822 (first shot in B&W) View attachment 78823 (later shot "Earthrise" in colour)

Maybe it's just the novelty of it (I hadn't seen it before) but I prefer the B&W version.

Imagine to make a print from that negative, watching the image appearing in the developer...

David A. Goldfarb · Dec 21, 2013

Alan Klein said:
The video voice indicated it was shot at F11 at 1/250. No auto meters apparently. What was the ASA of the film.

I'd guess the film would be ASA 64, figuring "sunny 16" accounts for atmospheric absorption/scattering when photographing on the earth's surface, so maybe from space through a window the rule might be more like "sunny 22." Presumably the folks at NASA and Kodak were calculating this or maybe even testing it, so there would be no difficulty in determining exposure. The audio also mentions that they bracketed a couple of frames.

Sirius Glass · Dec 21, 2013

Photo Engineer said:
Having worked at the Cape and at EK, I know that there is a cast of thousands to get a bird off the ground. No one man can do it alone. Making a pretty print is one of the smallest and most humble of those tasks, especially when compared to those who must face that ride up, and the vacuum.

All I have are a few pretty pix and awe at their achievement. They have the real memories.

PE

Frankly I do my best work in a vacuum.

wiltw · Dec 21, 2013

Alan Klein said:
The video voice indicated it was shot at F11 at 1/250. No auto meters apparently. What was the ASA of the film.

Awesome shot. It still stops me cold with feelings of personal insignificance.

Hasselblads were purely mechanical gems, no light meters, no electronically timed shutters, back then. No worry about dead batteries.

The emulsion was Ektachrome, ASA 64. References to 'custom' are explained by PhotoEngineer's explanation of the Estar thin base medium, to accommodate more exposures in the very limited supply of film on board.

Independently, both my wife and myself got up very early on many mornings watching the first Mercury missions, then the Gemini, as children. To think that we went from 1961 first man into space (Carpenter) to 1968 first orbit of the moon and then the first moon walk in 1969 is rather remarkable in view of the many aborted launch attempts due to technical issues or to weather.

Photo Engineer · Dec 21, 2013

Alan Sheppard was the first man from the US to make a suborbital flight and John Glenn was the first US Astronaut to make an orbital flight. The first man in space was the Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.

PE

Tom1956 · Dec 21, 2013

What I wonder is if the strange looking capsule the Russians had was equipped with a heat shield, or was it just such a "cannon-ball" of so much iron that it couldn't burn up, just on account of the mass and thickness of it. Stange-looking capsule, for sure. And if it entered window-side-down, that would have been all she wrote.

AgX · Dec 21, 2013

The complete shere was covered with asbestos shielding. I'm not sure how they managed the issue of the windows.
The sphere seems to be orientated by its center of gravity.

Tom1956 · Dec 21, 2013

Asbestos? I wonder if Russia today has as many asbestos lawyers advertising on TV as we have.

Stephen Schoof · Dec 21, 2013

That's great, thanks for sharing.

GarageBoy · Dec 23, 2013

wiltw said:
Hasselblads were purely mechanical gems, no light meters, no electronically timed shutters, back then. No worry about dead batteries.

Uh, the 500EL is electric

Hasselblad printed a little booklet for one of the anniversaries and that was the cover shot

NASA re-creates iconic Apollo 8 'Earthrise' 45 years later

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