OK, hihg-resolution may be overstating the case, but, great news!
You may have read how the original film footage of the first moon landing was lost. The footage seen on US television was very bad quality compared to the signal received from the moon: the video signal was received at a tracking station in Australia and then had to be changed from one format to another, compressed etc. to be transmitted to the US and shown on US television. Then, apparently, the only recording NASA had was from a 16mm camera pointed at a TV screen that was showing the low-quality TV broadcast.
Well, some people might have found the original magnetic recordings of the video transmission from the moon of the Apollo 11 mission! Which should be much better quality than what was seen in 1969 on your parent’s old black and white television.
I’ve been quite excited about this since news broke the other day. It’s astounding how much data is lying about in now-nearly irretrievable formats (like the Voyager and Pioneer missions).
…ignores the amount of willful ignorance it takes to be a landing denier. It may help with people who fall into the “well, maybe there’s something to the idea that we never went” camp, but the full-out loons aren’t going to be swayed by anything.
I don’t think anything will ever dissuade a dedicated conspiracy theorist. Markxxx is correct of course - it is highly suspicious that this footage only shows up 40 years after the fact. If anything, it supports the conspiracy theory.
Very cool! My husband was working at the Goddard Space Flight Center when they were trying to find the tapes. He said they went thru every drawer in every desk on the facility, among other things. Many people were afraid the tapes may have gone home with someone, or accidentally been tossed out.
Well the tapes weren’t too close to where he was. In case the link to the article describing the finding goes dead, I’ll mention that the tapes were found in a storage facility in Perth, Australia.
I thought this was going to be about the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which launched last week.
It’s about to begin high-res mapping of the moon, and will be able to image the leftover Apollo hardware! I think they’re hoping to release some images around the July 20 anniversary. Put together with the news about the tapes, this is shaping up to be a great summer for Apollo nostalgia.
I believe this to be the place the tapes were uncovered.
I’m excited… I hope they’ve got their hands on it and are able to digitally restore the hell out of it too, above and beyond the original signal, whatever might be there.
Also, obligatory link to the 2-hour special to air next month on the History Channel: Moonshot.
I was nine when I saw the images. I was really excited about the moonwalk, but when the first TV images were displayed, I remember trying to adjust the rabbit ears to get a better picture. So many years ago… How ironic the moon camera had a switch for a 1280p picture. (Of course, it had a dismal frame rate of only 5/8 frame per second).
Consider the irony that nowadays a lot of DTV’s today could handle that resolution with no degradation.
We have, or now more likely used to have, a 8mm film home movie of the Neil stepping out, climbing down the ladder, and dropping onto the moons surface.
So, imagine a crappy small black and white tv with poor reception. Imagine filming THAT with crappy 8mm black and white film. Also keep in mind even that set up, as poor as it is to start with, was probably done far from optimum.
You can not tell ANYTHING from that film. You see only vague glitch, which is where I suspect is the moment when Neil does his little drop. Most Bigfoot footage would win National Geo awards compared to that bit of family film history.
I don’t know - judging from the polaroid of the Goldstone monitor it looks like the video quality is going from really crappy to better than really crappy but not a whole lot. I think it’s great they found the tapes and were able to read them but I don’t think it ought to be played up too much. The tale kind of reminds me of when I was going through an electronic archive, cataloging old clinical studies and reports for a company that had been acquired.
I’m looking forward to seeing the footage.
