Why was NASA shooting black-and-white?

[BetterSense]

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dE-vOscpiNc&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DdE-vOscpiNc

In the video, the Apollo crewmembers have to scramble to load a roll of color film so they can take a color picture of the Earth.

Why weren't they always shooting color? I know that people in 1968 were much more used to black-and-white photos, but for a scientific trip, with no budget concerns, I would have expected nothing but color. Was it a reliability concern? Longevity/archival concern? Discuss.

[hoffner]

Because of the very harsh light on the Moon. No atmosphere meant harsh brilliance/shade ratio. It was easier and more precise to take B&W pictures.The Earth over the horizon was not a planned picture.

[BetterSense]

So it was latitude? Makes sense. Then why not color neg? I thought it was interesting they used sunny 16.

[gleaf]

Seem to recall a serious overexposure issue where they brought back the film, then a method was devised to dissolve out the right amount of silver so the hugely overexposed film would process and print.

[cowanw]

They must have done both. My wife's aunt printed colour prints for NASA. Interestingly she was based in London, Canada.

[StoneNYC]

It's telling me the video is not available :(

[evan clarke]

My Brother in Law worked for Ansco/gaf who made millions of square yards of film, and they supplied all the film and processing for Mercury and Gemini. The aero films have the resolution they needed for good evaluation.

[Colin Graham]

That was great, thanks for the link.

'Calm down, Lovell!'

too funny, sounds like any typical family fighting for the camera on a road trip.

[dave_whatever]

Maybe the colour neg film back then wasn't so hot (wasn't it supposed to have relatively bad archival properties?) and Kodachrome I imagine would require a lot of care with metering.

[Bryan Lemasters]

Ummm... what colors would you anticipate seeing on the surface of the moon?

[Kevin M Bourque]

Ummm... what colors would you anticipate seeing on the surface of the moon?

The Moon is far from monochrome, although the colors are subtle. Also, the hardware and people definitely had color. Color/BW has the same tradeoff on the Moon as the Earth.

On Apollo 12 Conrad and Bean landed very close to Surveyor 3 which had been on the Moon since April 1967. All the pictures of Surveyor are in monochrome because they brought the wrong film from the LEM.

As for why B&W in the first place.....maybe it took longer to get color prints back from the drugstore? This was 1968, after all......

[hoffner]

Ummm... what colors would you anticipate seeing on the surface of the moon?

Astronauts were very surprised when they discovered many colors of the Moon surface. Some color films filmed there show green, white, reddish etc.

[Bryan Lemasters]

Astronauts were very surprised when they discovered many colors of the Moon surface. Some color films filmed there show green, white, reddish etc.

OK, I understand that some color would be inevitable, it just seems that it would be so overwhelmingly shades of gray(ish) that the use of color film would be of little real value.

[BetterSense]

Of little artistic or aesthetic value perhaps, but color information is very important to scientists. I believe the recent mars probes have hyperspectral cameras even though humans only need RGB cameras...color information is extremely valuable.

[Thad Gerheim]

Interesting thread, there has to be a lot of people out there that know the answer to this. I met a guy, ironically in Yellowstone Park in 1977, that had been a NASA photographer and quit. You won't believe this, sounds like a Drew Wiley post, but he was at the time a candy salesman and delivery person for the concessions in the park. On a visit to his house in Roberts, Montana, which is 10 miles from Red Lodge MT. he showed me an incredible folder of photos. There were photos of the moon, mars and the ones he took himself of fighter jets going way faster than what the government was telling us at the time. I remember there being black and white and color photos. I wonder if the speed of film had a factor in this? His name was Chuck something, a great guy and I hope he has been having a good life.

[onnect17]

I would look at it in a different way. Red, Blue or Green happen to be the names of three wavelengths (or frequencies) than human eyes are sensitive to. I'm pretty sure many cameras and lens ending in the space were/are designed to target a specific WL, some pretty distant from the visible spectrum.

[r_a_feldman]

Many of the "color" images you see from space missions are "multi-spectral images", where they used multiple images each with a filter for a specific wavelength of light to create the "color" image that was desired. By controlling the wavelengths recorded, the image analysts can derive a lot of useful information about the physical composition of the object that is being imaged.

Bob

[StoneNYC]

Interesting thread, there has to be a lot of people out there that know the answer to this. I met a guy, ironically in Yellowstone Park in 1977, that had been a NASA photographer and quit. You won't believe this, sounds like a Drew Wiley post, but he was at the time a candy salesman and delivery person for the concessions in the park. On a visit to his house in Roberts, Montana, which is 10 miles from Red Lodge MT. he showed me an incredible folder of photos. There were photos of the moon, mars and the ones he took himself of fighter jets going way faster than what the government was telling us at the time. I remember there being black and white and color photos. I wonder if the speed of film had a factor in this? His name was Chuck something, a great guy and I hope he has been having a good life.

Haha I loved the first part about commenting on how this sounds like a Drew post it totally does..!!

Anyway this Chuck character might be in trouble now that you've given him away on all of his leaking of top-secret images ;)

[AF-ULF]

Some info on what they did shoot:

Each film magazine would typically yield 160 color and 200 black and white pictures on special film. Kodak was asked by NASA to develop thin new films with special emulsions. On Apollo 8, three magazines were loaded with 70 mm wide, perforated Kodak Panatomic-X fine-grained, 80 ASA, b/w film, two with Kodak Ektachrome SO-68, one with Kodak Ektachrome SO-121, and one with super light-sensitive Kodak 2485, 16,000 ASA film. There were 1100 color, black and white, and filtered photographs returned from the Apollo 8 mission.

http://history.nasa.gov/printFriendly/apollo_photo.html

[Thomas Greutmann]

For those interested in NASA Pictures from the moon: check out the book "Full moon" by Michael Light which shows many inspiring pictures from various Apollo missions.

BTW, it is a mix of color and B&W, so I assume they had both types of film on board. It says ín the book that they used B&W negative films and color transparencies.

Greetings, Thomas

[Darin Boville]

For those interested in NASA Pictures from the moon: check out the book "Full moon" by Michael Light which shows many inspiring pictures from various Apollo missions.

Great book, as is 100 Suns.

--Darin

[8x10 user]

They went back to 70mm 200 ISO Agfa slide film after the space shuttle Columbia disaster. Apparently it was determined that the damage may have been spotted in the launch video and the disaster adverted if they were not using an inferior Digital system.

I believe they choose Agfa over Kodak because Agfas film was available on a conduction base that prevented static discharge from exposing the film during the high operation speeds.


My Brother in Law worked for Ansco/gaf who made millions of square yards of film, and they supplied all the film and processing for Mercury and Gemini. The aero films have the resolution they needed for good evaluation.

[Drew Wiley]

Sorry to disappoint you, Thad, but I was never a candy salesman (I don't like either candy or photographs colored like candy), and I've never been involved with NASA. When my nephew lived with me he was employed at LBL up above UC doing hi-res mapmaking of the backside of the moon. It was all b&w. And over at SFMOMA at one time the did display a really huge composite print of the moon generated from something like that - the detail was incredible; but other than the
wow factor of that per se, I don't quite understand its artistic merit. Surface topography, esp related to relief, often better recognized in b&w. Even old time aerial
stereoscope shots will reveal landform details to such a degree that it makes anything on Google Earth look crude. You need one of those little folding stereo
viewers. If I were planning to land somewhere on a cratered surface like that, I'd certainly want something in black and white to help with the planning.