film processing, storage and digitalisation

[richard99]

Apologies if there's already a thread on this but I couldn't find one on the search, and I can't seem to find any info about this side of things on the web either:

I have read that the 70mm film was quarantined, then treated tested and processed, but wonder if anyone had anymore detail, for instance was it machine processed or pretty much done manually?

At that stage for all they knew, this might be the only photographic record that Apollo ever obtained from the moon, so I'd imagine it would be treated very carefully, for instance I wouldn't imagine you'd want to put it through any sort of transport mechanism etc.

Having obtained the processed film (was it neg/pos?), what happened next?
I'd envisage it been far too precious to be handled much so would imagine some dupes were made and the originals put into storage and rarely seeing light of day, but that's just an assumption.

Does anyone know when it was first digitised, if the original film was used, on how many occasions it's since been redigitised as technology has progressed, and what machines were used?

I know a little about scanning as it's something i used to do, and know that the potential detail in film is immense, right down to something approaching molecular level, so if you had a scanner capable of the analysis, you would be creating huge files and still not be sure you'd captured everything.

When I look around the web I see a lot of HB spending a lot of time/energy manipulating images, contrasting, saturating, colourising etc, looking for anomalies, strange marks etc, but unless they're sure of the origins of the image they're working from (ie could well be a scan of a print of 2nd/3rd gen dupe), then it's speculative at the very best.

[gonetoplaid]

As far as I know, the mission films were developed, and then immediately contact dupes were made of the original mission films. Then the original mission films went back into the cold storage freezer since they are worth far more than their weight in gold. The contact dupes were immediately distributed to various NASA subdivisions and research institutions around the world so that even if the cold storage freezer burned to the ground, then duplicate photographic records of the original films would exist at several locations.

As far as I am aware, all of the early published photos of the Apollo missions were created from the contact dupes. I could be wrong about this, but this seems to be the case. All of the mission film canisters are marked with labels which have a red background which usually means "mission critical" or some such.

I'm not sure when the first digital scans were made of the contact dupes of the original Apollo mission films. Obviously it was sometime in the 1990's when digital scanners reached a sufficient stage of development. Anything previous to the 1990's would have been drum scanned from a print made from a contact dupe.

Arizona State University currently is involved in a project to digitally scan and archive all of the original Apollo mission films. This is the first time that the actual Apollo mission films will have been digitally scanned, and this project started in 2007. Here is a neat link about the start of the project:

www.physorg.com/news105190869.html

And here is a really neat link which explains the full digital scanning and image processing techniques which ASU is using:

apollo.sese.asu.edu/ABOUT_SCANS/index.html

Mark Robinson at ASU is rather busy orchestrating the LRO mission. It seems that the Apollo mission film scanning project has temporarily taken a back seat. But in any event the ASU team will get around to scanning the much higher resolution Apollo panorama camera photos and then all of the Apollo Hasselblad photos taken by the Apollo astronauts.

Have fun looking at some of the digitally scanned metric (mapping) camera photos. Link:

wms.lroc.asu.edu/apollo/browse

It is absolutely amazing with regards to the amount of detail which was recorded on film from the A15 through A17 mapping cameras, especially considering that the mapping cameras had only a 3 inch focal length! Well what would you expect? After all, the metric cameras were designed for the US Air Force, adapted for use in the Apollo program, and were classified technology. The panorama cameras in particular were heavily classified technology at the time.

Everyone assumes that Kaguya (Selene) and the LRO's Narrow Angle Cameras (NOCs) were the first to photograph the Apollo landing sites. This is not the case. The mapping and panorama cameras aboard the later Apollo missions did capture some of the Apollo landing sites in enough detail to reveal sunlight glints off of the landers (either entire landers or the descent stages of previous missions). For example, mapping camera photos AS15-M-2555 and AS16-M-1388 through AS16-M-1390 appear to show sunlight glints off of the Apollo 11 LM descent stage. So, technically and historically speaking, these photos are some of the first to actually record Apollo hardware on the lunar surface. I will be making a YouTube video using these original mapping camera photos which have been digitally scanned by ASU, but at the moment this video is a project which is on the "back burner" so to speak.

Needless to say, the Apollo 15 command module's mapping camera also photographed the Apollo 15 LM's halo created by the LM's descent engine. I can't remember if I saw a sunlight glint off of the LM itself in any of the Apollo 15 mapping camera photos, but once the much higher resolution Apollo 15 panorama camera photos are scanned, I will bet that those photos will show sunlight glints of the Apollo 15 LM on the lunar surface. But of course the moon landing hoax believers will claim that Mark Robinson and all of the other scientists, professors and researchers at ASU now are "in" on the Apollo moon landing hoax -- 40 years later! Tee Hee.

[Kiwi]

Apr 22, 2010 15:03:20 GMT -4 gonetoplaid said:

...mapping camera photos... AS16-M-1388 through AS16-M-1390 appear to show sunlight glints off of the Apollo 11 LM descent stage.

Thanks for that info. It was fun looking, but it's not possible to see any sign of the LM in the online versions of the A16 photos and I would suspect not in the originals -- it would probably be below the level of the grain.

The main problem is that crater Moltke and Tranquility Base are hundreds of kilometres from the moonscape at the bottom of the A16 photos. If they were down there, or filmed from almost above, I'd say the chances of seeing Tranquility Base would be good, much like the Apollo 15 LM was filmed more than once in the mission's panorama camera.

At maximum zoom in AS16-M-1390 I could make out crater Collins (formerly Sabine D) which is 2.4 km diameter and 560 metres deep, and also the Cat's Paw, which is about 3 km north-northeast of the landing site. But the smallest crater visible has about five times the diameter of West crater, and if you can't see West, you can't see East (aka Little West) crater -- the one Neil Armstrong ran back and photographed -- nor the landing site or LM descent stage.

The high-res version of AS11-37-5447 does show West crater, 11 o'clock from the left side of the command module. Crater Collins is to the right of the CM and about the same diameter, and the Cat's Paw is immediately above the CM, about twice the CM's diameter away. Two CMs to the left of the Cat's Paw is a quarter circle (9 o'clock to 12 o'clock) of seven small craters. The first three from 9 o'clock are widely separated, the last four are bunched closer together, and one of them is small and faint. West is the sixth of the seven in the lineup, counting from 9 o'clock.

There's a labelled version of AS11-37-5447 which helps with landmarks and the series of photos on this link also helps:
www.boulder.swri.edu/~durda/Apollo/landing_sites.html

And even if you can't find West crater, AS11-37-5447HR is still a really cool photo.


Edited to add:

For any lurkers who don't know how to view numbered Apollo lunar surface photos and a few orbital ones --

1. Click on the link to the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal at the bottom of every page here.

2. Click on the mission, in this case Apollo 11.

3. Click on Image Library.

4. Page down to (or search for) the photo number and read its caption, plus other nearby ones in case they have more useful information.

5. Click on the links to standard or high-res versions.

Many photos also have a HHH:MM:SS link to the appropriate part of the journal which has information about what the astronauts were doing at the time.