Tuesday, July 18, 2006

TV from the Moon

Being that I have a strong TV background I found this article quite interesting. It outlines in detail how the video of Armstrong walking on the moon was received and processed before it got back to the USA (at the time, the moon was only in view clearly by a station in Australia). Apparently the images from the moon were quite sharp, but they were improperly converted on the Earth so what was seen by the US TV audience was very degraded and compressed. I was about 10 months old at the time, so I didn't see anything...

Oh.. For all you conspiracy people here's an interesting tidbit : according to this presentation, the original tapes (the high quality Slow Scan tapes which are apparently super sharp) were placed in the National Archives. These tapes are now missing and the only machines available to play them back are about to be decommissioned:

In 1970, the tapes were placed in the US National Archives in Accession #69A4099. By 1984, all but two of the over 700 boxes of Apollo era magnetic tapes placed in the Accession, were removed and returned to the GSFC for permanent retention. These tapes are now missing.

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