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Comment by sharkweek | Hacker News Reader

I was staring at a picture today (I think it was a screen capture from the Apollo 11 documentary).

It was a view out across the Moon’s horizon and then total darkness. At first I felt this strange sense of dread and emptiness but then reframed the feeling into awe.

I can’t even begin to imagine what that must have felt like to be actually standing there. Or to be in that tiny little shuttle orbiting around the moon at what is essentially the height of an airplane flying across the ocean.

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Apollo 11 is such a great documentary. They restored a lot of 70mm film and the clarity of the image is surreal.

It didn’t get screened in any cinemas where I live, but the bluray looks absolutely stunning. I wish they did a 4K release.

It was such a great documentary, I saw it twice. A tiny detail I picked up the second time around-- they gave Collins, Armstrong and Aldrin cinematography credits.

This movie keeps sounding better and better, I’m so annoyed that it didn’t show in any theatres in my hemisphere of the planet. It was pretty much a USA only release. I really want to see it, enough to fly across my country to see it, that’s a crazy day trip and a story to tell, but not enough to fly to the other side of the planet, return flights from Australia to the USA is a rather expensive trip for a movie, probably close to ten times the cost of my worst case, a cross country flight to Sydney.

I saw a trailer for Apollo 11 last night when I was at a rerun of First Man at a local cinema - the release date in the UK is 28th June so perhaps where you are also has a similar release date.

I have the same thing with many, many filmfestival films. I'm glad that there are torrents for some of them, including Apollo 11. Would love to pay for streams of filmfestival films, but there aren't many.

For Apollo 11 thankfully, there are plenty of options here: https://www.uphe.com/movies/apollo-11-2019 Scroll down a bit to find the 'find out more' heading. I used the iTunes version.

https://www.tiff.net/events/apollo-11-4k

At least some places aired it as such, but a quick Google implies there are no current plans to release it in 4k. Shame really.

I saw it in a theater. It was astounding. I bought the soundtrack. I find that when explaining what it is to other people, I have to take care to emphasize it is not the normal documentary format of: historical footage with narration, interview with participant, cut to more footage, cut back to different interview. It's a unique film because they were able to make a documentary with a "normal" film narrative entirely using real footage and no narration. I also think there's not many historical events one could do this with; most events don't have so much footage that you actually can construct a coherent narrative. (Consider: they have high quality footage of the crew getting to the rocket, going from different buildings to vans to suit prep.) And the 65mm footage is some of the highest quality film we have of 1969. Even the crowd footage is fascinating for that reason. It will certainly be nominated for a documentary Oscar.

I read a description of the final approach to the moon (it might have been from Michael Collins) and how unlike the way we see it from Earth, as they got very close it filled your view and was clearly spherical — had depth — hung there like a thing made of plaster of Paris…

My jaw would be hanging open the whole time — well, you know, if I weren't in free-fall.

Would the astronauts have seen only blackness? While under dark skies on Earth, we see the stars of the Milky Way. Wouldn’t the Astronauts on the moon see the same? Or does the illumination of the moon surface mask the stars?

I think the astronauts would have seen stars but the cameras would have required longer exposures to capture them.

Exposure is not the problem, dynamic range is. You could either get the stars and have surface all blown out or retain details of the surface and lose the stars.

Right, and exposure is what allows you to pick between those two cases.

At the risk of sounding like a crazy person, I'll share the words of the astronauts themselves: https://youtu.be/--AaixSNCUg?t=00m30s

Armstrong says that they couldn't see stars with their naked eyes. There seems to be a slight disagreement between him and Collins as to whether they could see stars while photographing the solar corona; Armstrong says he can't remember which stars he saw, Collins says he doesn't remember seeing any stars, and Armstrong nudges Collins with his elbow. I'm not claiming anything more than I've said, which is all there in the video linked above. I believe that those men probably landed on the moon, but don't know exactly what to make of them seeming to discreetly disagree on this topic. I could imagine a number of explanations.

It’s probably just a minor detail, the human eye is very good at adapting and perhaps a few of the moonwalking astronauts looked at the sky away from the high contrast regolith, long enough to adapt and saw some of the brightest stars, while others didn’t. As for the nudge, I suspect it was a warning, simply a heads up between fellow astronauts that poorly chosen words might become annoying conspiracy fodder for decades. They went there, they know it, the idea that their words might be used to argue otherwise is probably not their first thought when describing anything about their time on the lunar surface. To them they are describing the material evidence that we went there, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a shared desire to keep each other from making mistakes, likely born from years of training together.

Not saying you're wrong about the eye adapting, but note that Collins was not a moonwalking astronaut. I've considered that this could be some difference between viewing the solar corona from the command module as opposed to the surface. It could also be memory issues. Perhaps they ran so many drills with a simulated solar corona photographing sequence that the guy who stayed in the sky mixed up this experience and the real thing, whereas Armstrong knew what it actually looked like. I've entertained wilder thoughts as well, but on the whole I think there's probably a mundane, down-to-moon explanation for the disagreement and elbow nudge.

> Or to be in that tiny little shuttle orbiting around the moon at what is essentially the height of an airplane flying across the ocean.

Minor correction: the lander was not "orbiting" the moon, the command module was.

And it wasn't a "shuttle".

Yeah, but I didn't want to sound too pedantic (I did change it silently in my response, though).

It was not the STS orbiter commonly referred to as "the space shuttle" but it most certainly was a shuttle in the sense of taking one there and back again.

Didn't it orbit too?

I mean, sure: it was part of the Apollo spacecraft until it detached. But it didn't orbit that low from the surface of the moon, unless you want to call the descent/ascent stage part of an "orbit".

Um, I hate to be that person. But as long as the periapsis doesn’t drop below the surface, the body is still orbiting. Technically speaking, even if that event occurs i.e. it is on a descent trajectory, then it becomes a suborbital flight. In this case, that didn’t happen, according to the mission report, the spacecraft;

> The lowest measured point in the trajectory was 47 400 feet from the lunar surface. Following one revolution in the phasing orbit, about 8 by 194 miles, the lunar module was staged, and the ascent engine was used to perform an insertion maneuver at about 103 hours https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a410/A10_MissionReport.pdf

It never entered a suborbital trajectory. Consequently, it was orbiting the moon and the article is accurate.

An orbit is not defined by height for bodies with negligible atmospheres, it’s defined by velocity and (as a side effect) the apogee and perigee of the trajectory. As long the trajectory never hits the surface, it can be 1/4 of an inch above the highest surface feature under the trajectory and still be an orbit.

Huh, I thought that they were suborbital and decided to boost back up. If they completed a full ellipse then that's a pretty valid orbit, albeit I wouldn't call it one "at the height of an airplane" without qualification.

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