The Lunar Obiters

[james]

Well it's not about Apollo itself, but it's related, so I hope it's fine to post this topic here.

I don't know a lot about these probes and I'd like to learn more. I've read some of the information about them in wikipedia and a few other site. I ask this, because a thread at abovetopsecret.com opened up on this subject. A guy by the name of John Lear has posted several scanned images from these missions and I just feel that I don't know enough about these probes to discuss the subject very.

What i'd mostly like to learn more about is the images produced by them. I know they used film and were processed and scaned and transmitted back to Earth. Things I don't know for sure are, what are the horizontal seam lines running through the images? Were they scanned and transmitted back in strips? I also assume that the fuzzy white dots in the black 'sky' are just film grain/ noise and possibly also dust from the scanner and not stars? And the photos that are taken at an angle. How low to the surface were these taken from?

Here is the thread in question for those who might be curious, there are also some nice high res scans of some images as well.. www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread225616/pg1

[gwiz]

All you could ever wan't to know about the system here:

ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19680071016_1968071016.pdf

You're quite right about the frames being scanned a strip at a time, hences the stripey appearance. The onboard film processing used a system where the film was pressed against an absorbent material laced with the necessary chemicals. This introduced a lot of features that damaged image quality, including air bubbles preventing the chemicals reaching the film and linear marks where the system started and stopped.

I think the low-angle photos, particularly the famous one of the Copernicus crater, were taken from high altitude, but you'd need to go through the individual mission reports to get all the data.

I doubt very much the white dots are stars. Looking for similar dots in the black shadowed ground areas would give a clue.