Portfolio from Apollo

Potifolio from Apollo

With each mission to the moon, U.S. astronauts have become increasingly skilled as photographers. Apollo 17 proved to be no exception to the rule. Last week, as NASA began releasing pictures shot by the Apollo 17 crew, it be came clear that the last lunar mission had produced the best photography of the entire Apollo program: more brilliant in color, sharper in detail and more imaginative in overall composition.

Much of the credit belongs to Gene Cernan, who had special reason for his all-out photographic effort. During the flight of Gemini 9 in 1966, he took a dramatic "walk" in space as his ship circled the earth. But most of the shots taken of Cernan by his fellow astronaut Tom Stafford were lost when a film pack accidently floated out of the open hatch and disappeared in space. Only one spacewalk picture--showing a partial view of Cernan--was returned to earth. That made Cernan more determined than ever to come home with a superior and complete photographic record of Apollo 17.

The lengths to which Space Photographer Cernan went to achieve his goal are particularly apparent in one shot. To crowd his fellow moon walker Jack Schmitt, the U.S. flag and the distant earth into one small frame, Cernan had to drop to his knees in his stiff space suit and thrust himself backward so that the chest-mounted camera could be properly aimed. To obtain a view of Schmitt and a giant boulder, Cernan insisted on scrambling up an incline. He also aimed and re-aimed until he was finally able to squeeze into one frame the lunar rover, Schmitt and the startling orange soil that Schmitt had discovered at Shorty Crater. Geologist Schmitt also proved an adept lensman, but as might be expected, he showed more of an eye for lunar rocks than for his fellow astronaut.

Early in the mission, Astronaut Ron Evans made his most notable photographic contribution; he took a picture that will rank among the classics of the space program. As Apollo sped toward the moon after blasting into its translunar trajectory, he pointed his camera back toward home and caught a stunning view of the earth, with the side visible to the astronauts completely illuminated. In crystal-clear detail it shows almost the entire coastline of Africa and the offshore island republic of Malagasy, the Arabian peninsula and an unusually thick cover of swirling clouds over Antarctica and the surrounding region at the bottom of the world.

Gamble. The excellence of the Apollo 17 photographs is also due in part to the quality of the film used by the astronauts. On previous missions, NASA'S photographic advisers opted for a fairly sensitive film similar to Ekta-chrome-EF; because lunar lighting conditions were uncertain, they wanted a fast emulsion. But for Apollo 17, the space agency decided to switch to another Kodak film that is somewhat slower (ASA rating of only 64 v. 160 for the earlier film), but has significantly less grain and better color reproduction. The gamble worked. The record 3,800 frames that were shot by the astronauts with their 70-mm. Hasselblads contained hardly a flawed exposure. What is more, even after being exposed to the vacuum of the moon, only a few of the 165 to 170 frames in each film pack were damaged; there were barely visible hairline cracks in their thin chemical emulsion.

The photographic outpouring also pleased scientists at the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, who found the pictures highly useful in initial identification and examination of the freshly arrived lunar rocks last week. Geochemist Paul Cast, the Manned Spacecraft Center's chief lunar scientist, noted, for example, that the closeups of the moon's surface were so clear that the orange soil showed up as a distinct band in the surrounding material. To Cast, those sharp color boundaries were another indication that the orange soil is young by lunar standards and a product of relatively recent volcanism on the moon. If the band of orange soil had been around a long time, he points out, its distinctness would have been blurred by the slow "gardening" of the moon's surface that occurs under the relentless bombardment of particles from deep space.

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