Apollo Discussions > The Hoax Theory

Stars in Apollo 16mm magazines

(1/3) > >>

apollo16uvc:
NASA made several attempts to record stars with 16mm film. I think they pushed 800 or 1600 film to ASA 12800, resulting in extremely large film grain.

I and OBM talked briefly about this, for the longest time neither of us could find these magazines. I just assume the attempts failed because the resolution was just too low, lenses didn't let through enough light and the shutter speeds were too fast.

Recently I took an other deep-dive in archive.org because I was looking for high-quality scans of the 16mm mags. I found ultra-high bitrate MXF files there, and have been spending the last week downloading all of them. I've got a few projects in mind, but thats for something else...

What I found there are the Apollo 16 attempts for dim-light 16mm 'photography'

AS16-MAG II, HH & MM

The high-quality MXF file can be found at MPEG2 (5,4gb)

I havent looked through the Apollo photoraphic record documents for some time, but I think they tried this at other missions also? not sure.


I have already told OBM about this, and figured some would like to see his progress in finding stars. I have gone through it a couple of times and there are several short segments of bright dots. And the occasional streaks...

Looking forward to OBM's work.

onebigmonkey:
I keep dipping into this but so far have only successfully identified Ursa Major in Mag HH:



HH is listed in the photo index as being 'Sunrise solar corona. REV 38,REV 47/48'. There are other things that appear to be celestial objects but as they are just a few objects it's difficult to be absolutely certain. Sunrise would have been on the lunar far side and Ken Mattingly was on his own at the time,so there isn't a lot in the transcripts to go on, but Ursa Major would certainly have been in the right place for that.

There is quite a bit of this:



but having seen this on magazines that were used for other things I'm confident they are just headers and not of interest.

What is of interest is the footage of what appears to be John and Charlie suiting up prior to entering the LM:



Which I don't think has been seen before.

Magazine MM is listed as dim light photography, which could equally apply to objects on the surface (similar photography was done in Apollo 15 looking at objects in Earthshine) and some of the features in it look more like glints off the edges of craters.

I'm dopwnloading the MPEG2 file to see if that reveals any more detail

Apollo 14 also used a 16mm magazine (J) for Gegenschein region photography, but this has not (as far as I can tell) appeared on line and is not listed in the photo index.

Retro Space Images recently posted this image of magazines returned by Apollo 14 awaiting transfer for processing:



It looks to me as though the list on the lid goes up to 'I' and 'J' is missing. Either that or it is a smudged 'J' ad 'I' is missing, but we know that I exists!

smartcooky:
Looks like it goes

BB, CC, DD, A, B, C, D, G, H, J
AA

So "E" and "I" is missing

onebigmonkey:

--- Quote from: smartcooky on February 16, 2020, 04:37:36 AM ---Looks like it goes

BB, CC, DD, A, B, C, D, G, H, J
AA

So "E" and "I" is missing

--- End quote ---

And also F, though the 'G' could also be an E!

apollo16uvc:
Those bars in the second image are seen in other b/w films, for later calibration I suppose. But none have all those spots like the ones seen in that mag.

So I do think those are stars.  Don't know how this happened, they rewound the 16mm film after shooting the calibration on earth before mission?

Alternatively, they look like the multiple windowpanes, for example at 5:56 when the sun angle and viewing angle gets just right.

I've talked with someone about the MXF files and he said sometimes mags are played in reverse in the video files. Don't know if this is the case.

I advice downloading large archive.org files via the torrent they provide. It allows to download multiple files at once and gives me much higher download speeds and reliability than downloading via browser. When I have the time I am going to attempt stacking some curious frames.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page