Video of the first moon landing, 40 years ago today

"That's one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind." - Neil Armstrong, July 20, 1969

[#1 posted by Daneman, July 20, 2009 6:59 AM]

um... 40 years.

[#2 posted by Enochrewt, July 20, 2009 7:07 AM]

Man if it was only 30 years I would kind of remember it.

[#3 posted by daeward, July 20, 2009 7:08 AM]

It even says 1969 in the title...

[#4 posted by cinemajay, July 20, 2009 7:09 AM]

Yeah, I think I'd remember it too!

[#5 posted by Latente, July 20, 2009 7:19 AM]

IN B4
"never on the moon"

[#6 posted by Talia, July 20, 2009 7:53 AM]

For the interested, tor.com has a series of blog postings up with a who's-who of sci fi literature sharing their memories of the landing.

Its super cool.

[#7 posted by Beverly Stayart, July 20, 2009 7:58 AM]

The space race was in high gear in the late 1960s. The moon landing and Neil Armstrong's historic comments in 1969 helped to elevate the prestige of the United States.

[#8 posted by Uncle Geo, July 20, 2009 8:00 AM]

I always chalked up the missing "a" to the voice activated mics just not being fast enough, or maybe the "a" was not loud enough to trigger it, so I always thought he did say it-but I could be crazy.

In a way it's almost better as a flub -here we have one of the greatest moments in human history and we see Armstrong being human. I heard this morning that Armstrong's heart rate was through the roof as he stepped off. If a trained Astronaut was zipping, I'd have been a pool of jelly.

I'm sure lots of old farts like me will weigh in but it is impossible to describe the excitement at the time. Nothing that's happened since has engaged the whole world in the same way. Everyone watched, you didn't see cars on the street. All three networks carried the moon shots (and the previous Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions) live all day and night until they signed off.

It was really something to see an entire nation get behind JFK's challenge to get to the moon before 1970. For a kid it was cooler than anything! I'd wait anxiously for the National Geographics and Life as they always had the best pictures in way higher res and better color than TV. Astronauts were rockstars. Our heads were filled with the Space Age and scifi and there was a science and engineering thrust in the schools (we really need that today!). Best of all the whole world actually got to watch the real thing as it happened! Kinda took our minds off the nukes.

[#9 posted by ackpht, July 20, 2009 8:13 AM]

I remember it. I'll never forget it.

[#10 posted by Antiqueight, July 20, 2009 8:39 AM]

I barely managed to be born into a world where man was walking on the moon. It seems strange to think they did it for such a small space of time.

But since I missed it the first time around I have been following the 'live' feed from Apollo 11 online from launch to landing and enjoying every minute.

[#11 posted by Roy Trumbull, July 20, 2009 8:52 AM]

There is a tale that I've not bothered to research. To the effect there was a cryptic line uttered on the moon to the effect of "Good luck Mr.(name)". The full story followed years later when the man was dead. Seems as a kid the moon walker had heard an argument at his neighbor's house in which the wife said, "You'll get a bl*w j*b when that kid next door flies to the moon."
I'm sure someone can unearth the whole story.

[#12 posted by Akula971, July 20, 2009 8:58 AM]

I was 8 at the time, we just got colour TV, the Harrier Jump jet was new, Concorde just took its first flight and promised that it could whisk you across the Atlantic in 3 hours. Although we lived under the threat of war with the Warsaw Pact, it looked like the future was bright, we'd have manned outposts on the Moon and Mars in 20 years!

What went wrong?

[#13 posted by Angstrom, July 20, 2009 8:58 AM]

it's such a shame that the general public fell out of love with space exploration. They expected a swift evolution from primitive rockets to inter-planetary craft traveling to the Venus Hilton.

I'm of the kind that thinks long-term expansion is the only way the human race will develop. If we wait until we have created 'world peace' before we start to explore then we will be waiting a very long time indeed.
Sadly, successive government around the world continue to focus on short-term fire fighting instead of long-term expansion. We need energy and materials, we will fight for them. yet there's a nuclear furnace out there and minerals galore. Let's go get them eh?

BTW: I'm in the UK, where our space program consists of a man throwing a rock at a tree.

[#14 posted by Uncle Geo, July 20, 2009 9:28 AM]

http://wechoosethemoon.org/#

Live broadcast recreation. Seems to be mission audio only at this point.

[#15 posted by Mistico, July 20, 2009 9:31 AM]

Not trolling, honestly, but does anyone have an explanation for the transparency effect from around 0:50 'til the end? It appears you can see directly through the astronaut to the flag and lander behind him. Which shouldn't be possible.

Again, not trolling, just honestly perplexed. And I can't seem to find a good explanation anywhere else on the all-knowing internets.

[#16 posted by Jack Daniel, July 20, 2009 9:40 AM]

Those are some bad-ass humans.

[#17 posted by Steve Schnier, July 20, 2009 9:42 AM]

The "transparency effect" is a burn-in on the tube of the TV camera. The direct sunlight was so intense that it would "scar" the tube leaving a permanent mark. Early TV cameras were very vulnerable to that.

[#18 posted by Uncle Geo, July 20, 2009 9:43 AM]

I'm guessing only a little here but it is likely the tube used in the video camera. This smearing effect was not uncommon in tube cameras, especially when the contrast was extremely high as it had to be on the moon.

A good example used to be stadium lights at a ball game back when tube cameras were used. The imager's phosphor -all phosphors- have a lag time. As the camera panned across them they'd leave a comet trail behind them. You actually had to be very careful with tube cameras as you could make any high contrast object in the picture permanent (ruining the camera) if you left it in the image too long.

There are also a number of digitizing artifacts (around the edges of anything moving) in this video that would not be in the original (it was analog video). Interesting article in Wired a while back that the original tapes were actually higher res than TV at the time but that the tapes have been lost.

[#19 posted by Anonymous, July 20, 2009 9:47 AM]

Go into a dark room with a CRT (not lcd or plasma) tv. Shine a flashlight at the screen for ten seconds. Watch the phosphors glow. Same principle in action.

[#20 posted by Uncle Geo, July 20, 2009 9:52 AM]

The We Choose The Moon site would be way cooler if you could choose to watch the network's coverage. It was a cavalcade of scientists, engineers, and reporters covering every angle of the story with animations of the various maneuvers.

[#21 posted by Beanolini, July 20, 2009 9:57 AM]

#11, Roy Trumbull:

"You'll get a bl*w j*b when that kid next door flies to the moon."

As always, debunked by Snopes.

[#22 posted by Anonymous, July 20, 2009 10:25 AM]

much better with a Pink Floyd live, improvised soundtrack :)

[#23 posted by Uncle Geo, July 20, 2009 10:27 AM]

OK, it is Fox, but here's talk

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,532508,00.html

of the original high res moon landing tapes supposedly being found -to be released Thursday.

However the link to Nasa's release

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2009/jul/HQ_M09-125_Newseum_Apollo_tapes.html

seems to be for the newly restored video by a restoration team. The release does not exactly say the Australian tapes have been found. It's also reported that the video that has been around was shot off the projection screens at Mission control. If the original video has been found it was higher res and will make better video than what we saw on TV at the time.

The BRits have apparently been cobering this and seem to think the films have been found.

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/110442/WORLD-EXCLUSIVE-NASA-finds-missing-moon-landing-tapes

[#24 posted by Mistico, July 20, 2009 11:28 AM]

@#17 + 18,

That's what I was thinking as well, but the effect seems to be the reverse of the "lag-time" I've seen elsewhere; objects are seen as another image crosses OVER them, which you wouldn't think would be possible with a "burn-in" on the camera tube.

Can anyone point to another film that has this same effect?

@#20,

No dark room or CRT TV handy - what is the principle you're describing?

I know, too much time on my hands. It just seems a little curious that I've seen less obvious discrepancies debunked (Coke bottle on the moon, anyone?), but couldn't find a good explanation for this one. Thanks much for the help.

[#25 posted by Angstrom, July 20, 2009 12:24 PM]

Mistico,it is more likely an artifact of the weird process of converting the footage for broadcast. Just imagine what the technology was like back then for converting 320 scan lines at 10 fps into 525 scan lines at 30 fps. I can easilly imagine where crossfading would come in.

When we in the UK used to get American footage sent over, it was frame-rate converted from NTSC to PAL. It exhibited similar ghosting effects like this (not as bad) and that was in the 1980s.

Nasa tv methods
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.01/nasa.html

[#26 posted by Roy Trumbull, July 20, 2009 12:46 PM]

My understanding is that the camera was a two tube camera with a revolving color filter wheel in the path of the color tube. Thus there was Y-B and Y-R and G was computed. The only problem is that there was a delay between the two acquired color difference signals.
A one field surface acoustic wave filter (SAW) had been developed for the Mexico City Olympics to work with a two tube camera used there. I would guess something like that was used.
I recall a surplus store in the Boston area was where they got the lens used for the camera.

[#27 posted by franko, July 20, 2009 1:02 PM]

i was only two years old at the time, and i swear what must be one of my earliest memories is of my mom taking me to the window at night and pointing at the moon and telling me that there were men standing up that that night, and that i should remember this moment. i'm listening to the last half hour of the landing audio right now, and i'm getting tears over it. so incredible.... what a moment. deniers can go die in a fire.

[#28 posted by Uncle Geo, July 20, 2009 1:54 PM]

#24

You would see , say, another astronaut passing in front of the first one and still see an image (like an afterimage) of the first guy because the lag would, in effect, keep the phosphor energized long enough that even new images moving past the same spot would still kinda show the old one.
#25, it could be that but my bets on the lag.Think of a glow in the dark toy. While exposing it you put a finger on part of it and then change finger position -you'll still see a little of the first one.

#26 The first moon landing was black and white so it's unlikely they used the two tube filter wheel cam -however, you are right about those two tube jobbies -some later cameras were indeed two tube, one for luminance ("Y" or brightness, if you will) and chrominance ("C" or color) and the color one had a filter wheel spinning color filters. These were likely used on later moon shots. There might have been some YC delay but that would show up as the color being out of it's black and white bounds -i.e. the color part of the image offset to the right of the B&W.

[#29 posted by Uncle Geo, July 20, 2009 1:55 PM]

And #27 -all this tech talk should not diminish the real magic -people on the MOON!

[#30 posted by tim, July 20, 2009 4:50 PM]

I was 9. We had the second colour TV in our village and at various times during the mission we had up to 100 kids in our living room watching it. The school had tvs on pretty much all the time so we could see what was happening. In those days it really seemed like I could dream of being the first man on Mars without feeling utterly stupid.

Of course, I didn't make that first spot. But it's great to be here in Lowell Base anyway, taking part in the celebrations of this great anniversary!

Whaddya mean wrong universe? Damn, used the wrong net connection again...

[#31 posted by Fiddy, July 20, 2009 5:59 PM]

I was 10 years old at the time, and staying at my grandparent's house for the summer. They let me stay up late to watch the moon walk (as it was past 10:00 p.m. CST, and I was supposed to be in bed). I stayed up all night watching it after they went to bed. I don't know when I fell asleep, but I dreamed I was up there with them.

The camera was black and white (and so was the television I was watching), so I never noticed much distortion. I do remember that one of the later missions (Apollo 14?) had a major malfunction with the television camera when one of the astronauts accidentally pointed it at the sun and it burned out the vidicon tube. The only record of that mission are the still photos taken by the crew, since the only videocamera available was essentially useless after that. Lots of TV stations just showed the last image the camera captured before the accident for what seemed like hours and hours.

[#32 posted by Talia, July 20, 2009 6:11 PM]

I was -8 at the time. My memories are fuzzy.