Who Took the Legendary Earthrise Photo from Apollo 8? | Hacker News Reader

Who Took the Legendary Earthrise Photo from Apollo 8?

smithsonianmag.com

77 pointssohkamyung27 comments

The Earthrise reconstruction by Wright and Gallagher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dE-vOscpiNc

Video of the Earthrise he's talking about in the article - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dE-vOscpiNc

I just finished Andrew's A Man on the Moon book a couple of weeks ago and I throughly enjoyed it.

Thanks. Not sure why the article doesn't link to the video. BTW, there's also an HBO miniseries made from the book that's well worth watching:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Earth_to_the_Moon_(mi...

Interesting story. I remember having heard on radio another story about tang (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_(drink)). Excessive consumption was causing flatulence that was the cause of a dispute during a space mission. I was not able to find anything about it using google.

Skylab had a flatulence problem: https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4208/ch16.htm

https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3bco7e/til_a...

Just to clarify, the earth does not rise on the moon (just wobbles). The earth appears to rise because the orbiter circling the moon.

I had a friend who believed the moon landings were fake because of the Earth rise. He rightfully explained it could not happen. I told him the Earth rise happened while they were in orbit (or sub-orbit, whatever), and so he looked it up, realized he was wrong, and gave up on the idea that the moon landings were fake just like that. He had mistakenly believed the Earth rise footage was taken from the surface of the moon. It's always nice to see someone willing to change their mind in the face of new evidence.

Why are there no visible stars in the background?

I once got curious about that myself, so I downloaded some of the full size black and white TIFFs from the NASA site. (I'd link them, but I'm not sure where the archive is today.)

Anyway, if you bring up the shadows a long way in Photoshop in some of the pictures you'll find some little dots that look a whole lot like stars.

If you'd like to test this for yourself, take some photos of the full moon with a telephoto lens. The moon is extremely bright, as nighttime objects go, and the amount of exposure needed by the camera to capture a photo is short. Edit: The moon will be properly exposed, the sky dark.

There's something called the Looney 11 rule, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looney_11_rule. Basically, you can set the camera to these settings and obtain a reliably exposed photo of the moon. There's a similar rule for objects on earth which are in full sunlight called the Sunny 16 rule. The important thing to note is that there is one camera stop difference between these settings. Objects in full sunlight on earth reflect twice as much light as the sunlight reflected from the moon. And in terms of photography, that is a trivial difference.

Try those Looney 11 camera settings indoors sometime. There's not even enough light in your house for those settings to work. You'll see the lightbulbs, some reflections, light coming in through windows, etc, but not much else.

The important point to take away is the difference in the amount of light between the stars in the sky and the surface of the moon, is significant. It's large enough that it doesn't fit into the exposure latitude of color transparency film used (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposure_latitude), and is very deep in the shadows of negative film if it registers at all.

But rather than take anyone's word, this is something anyone who has a camera can try for themselves.

Because it is daytime.

(If the camera exposure was set for the faint stars, then the sun-lit scene would be hugely overexposed.)

I am not sure this is the complete explanation. On Earth we do not see stars because of light scattering (Rayleight and Mie) [0]. In the outer space there is no scattering and the light from each star represents a tiny point in the picture, but this point is bright. After all it comes from a sun. But the original image [1] has a dark background as well.

Maybe it is due to the fact that jpeg compression losses small artifacts or something else.

On some pictures it is possible to see tiny white points such as in [2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffuse_sky_radiation

[1] https://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a410/AS8-14-...

[2] https://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a410/AS8-15-...

(some non important edits, including changing link 2 which was a thumb view)

We see stars during solar eclipses, so it is the scattering of the light of the sun that obscures them. It really _is_ the exposure issue, since the surface brightness of the Earth is that of full daylight and so full daytime exposures were needed. Stars will never show up unless longer exposures are used.

Here is an over exposed photo of Earth by Apollo 16 from the lunar surface, with stars visible:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Apollo_16_UV_photo_of_Ear...

I may not have been so clear (English is not my native tongue, etc), but you repeat what I wrote:

* it is the scattering of the light of the sun that obscures them

* On some pictures, stars are visible (I even provided a link)

However having said that you also say "It really _is_ the exposure issue" but it has nothing to do with light scattering?

I think light scattering is an atmospheric phenomenon.

They didn't have time to finish painting the set, obviously.

I'm glad they got the Earthrise Photo, because otherwise, six months before Apollo 11 gave the world a line which even impressed the Soviets, Apollo 8 would be remembered for this cringey, inane stuff[1]:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToHhQUhdyBY

[1] To avoid misunderstanding: this isn't an atheist/anti-religion post, it's about the aptness of such an utterance by personnel on a top scientific mission, from one of the world's top scientific agencies.

Edit: * sigh * and insta-downvote bot strikes again

The concern has been raised before: https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/3...

(eta: Nothing earns downvotes on Hacker News like complaining about downvotes does. If getting downvoted here bothers you - and God alone knows why it would - then complaining about downvotes is a habit worth avoiding.)

Thanks. I wasn't aware of that. I just remember the first time I ever saw that footage, couldn't believe what I was hearing, and haven't forgotten it.

My own objection isn't even about government/state promotion of religion - though I'm not particularly a fan of that - it's that a scientific body like NASA comes out with "God created Earth".

And I wouldn't even mind that if NASA stated it was their official position. Then anyone is free to decide on their scientific credibility.

Instead we had an organization making itself look ridiculous by unnecessarily pandering to beliefs it couldn't possibly officially hold.

You are conflating the official position of the organization with a statement made by one of its employees on company time. The linked decision thoroughly considers this point as well, and finds it unconvincing. NASA's official allegiance in matters of faith was found to be as nonexistent as befits a US government agency. The court recognizes that sometimes people say things of their own accord, for which they alone are responsible. It seems a sensible enough analysis.

By modern mores, of course such a thing would be a firing offense and the seed crystal around which much Buzzfeed and Twitter would briefly accrete. (It would be a firing offense because it would be, &c., &c. I suppose it's only a mercy none of the Apollo 8 crew were seen in public to wear shirts their friends had made for them.) But we here discuss a historical event, now some fifty years in the past. The application of modern mores to historical events is called "presentism", a word whose pejorative connotation is well earned by the fact that such tendentious analysis generates only heat, never light.

And leaving fallacies of historiography aside, as far as I'm concerned, the employees of any past or future NASA capable of carrying out a manned lunar mission can quote whatever scripture they like from lunar orbit, because it strikes me as absurd unto risibility to be more concerned with their quoting scripture than with their doing so from lunar orbit. But I am certainly a very strange man, and will not in any case be consulted, and what people say will continue for probably some time to outweigh unto negligibility what those same people do. So it goes.

> You are conflating the official position of the organization with a statement made by one of its employees on company time.

1. It was not one person, it was everyone on board.

2. Describing NASA trained professionals, paid by NASA, in their NASA gear and NASA hardware, representing NASA on a monumental, history-making, multi-billion dollar NASA mission into deep space as mere "employees on company time" is beyond ridiculous, frankly.

Three employees, then. Did you have a substantive response to make? I mean, I understand that you're not satisfied with how the events of Apollo 8 played out. What I don't understand is whence comes the belief, which you seem to cherish quite strongly, that your satisfaction or lack thereof is of any relevance to those events.

> Did you have a substantive response to make?

Did you?

> I understand that you're not satisfied with how the events of Apollo 8 played out. What I don't understand is whence comes the belief, which you seem to cherish quite strongly, that your satisfaction or lack thereof is of any relevance to those events.

I understand that you're not satisfied with my posts about how Apollo 8 played out. What I don't understand is whence comes the belief, which you seem to cherish quite strongly, that your satisfaction or lack thereof is of any relevance to anything.

So, no.

Amen!

You're definitely coming off as an edge-lord for calling this inane. Today, I'm sure Twitter would melt because of it (you can't even have a shirt people don't like without causing outrage), but the country was very different back then. Plus these missions were more than a scientific endeavor, because it took more than science to put everything in place for it. It was the biggest accomplishment by us as a species, so they wanted mark it with what they considered the most important thing in their lives. To me it's cringey that you can't look at it objectively without taking some kind of offense to it. But hey, that's just me.

> You're definitely coming off as an edge-lord for calling this inane.

And you're definitely coming off as an idiot using a term like "edge-lord".

> Today, I'm sure Twitter would melt because of it (you can't even have a shirt people don't like without causing outrage)

I have no interest in Twitter - so unfortunately I don't know which particular chip on your shoulder you're rambling on about - but you should probably save your hot take on the issue for a relevant thread.

> but the country was very different back then.

Yes, instead of melting Twitter people merely filed lawsuits.

> Plus these missions were more than a scientific endeavor, because it took more than science to put everything in place for it.

Did it take God creating Earth in the first place?

> It was the biggest accomplishment by us as a species, so they wanted mark it with what they considered the most important thing in their lives.

So it's the biggest accomplishment by us as a species, but really all about what three guys in a can want?

> To me it's cringey that you can't look at it objectively without taking some kind of offense to it. But hey, that's just me.

Good for you.

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