Soviet Moon Images (2004) | Hacker News Reader

Soviet Moon Images (2004)

mentallandscape.com

160 pointszoomablemind37 comments

What absolutely blew me away was to realize that operators were able to guide the Lunokhods by looking at the low-res video feed in black-and-white on a small CRT with motion feedback latency.

The whole surface is flooded with sunlight and it's hard to perceive much DOF. Moon surface at that angle looks very much flat to my untrained eye.

Yet the rover covered lots of distance with just a few (still serious) navigational mishaps (like when it almost slid down a slope into an unexpected crater).

The feedback latency is just ~2.5 seconds, humans can adapt to that. I remember myself using a dial-up to access a server via ssh, it occasionally had a similar latency just because of a low bandwidth due to phone line issues. The longer I used it the better it felt.

I went down a rabbithole and was looking for the earliest full-disc photos of Earth. Most of the sites I found used exclusively US images ("the Blue Marble" etc), no Soviet representation. Not sure if that's because there truly are no early full-disc images from the Russia or not? The earliest one I could find is from Zond-5, 1968: http://mentallandscape.com/CS_Zond05_1.jpg

Anyone know if there is an earlier image?

edit: found this page but it doesn't have the actual image from 1966 (Molniya 1-3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_first_images_of_Ea...

edit: I think I found it https://i.stack.imgur.com/LOqc7.jpg From this Quora post https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/32422/was-the-eart...

It's crazy how much better the US manned photos are on the Hasselblad. There's absolutely no imperfections.

I wonder how the US managed to get such crystal clear photos.

Stanley Kubrick was well known for his abiding interest in camera technology. /s

Reminds me of the excellent joke - "Getting Stanley Kubrick to fake the moon landing seemed like it'd save a lot of effort, but the man insisted on shooting on location."

I wonder how much this rumor has to do with how Kubrick used NASA lenses.[0] This one and flat earth have been my favorite consipracy theories.

[0]https://petapixel.com/2016/07/18/check-legendary-nasa-f0-7-l...

The biggest reason was that the Apollo program was able to return film from the surface of the Moon to Earth. Many of these photos weren't returned to Earth in film form. Instead they were developed onboard the spacecraft, scanned, transmitted via radio, and then recorded onto tape on the ground. Every step of that process incurs a decent bit of quality loss.

You can actually tell which probes had a reentry module because the photo quality is pretty stunning compared to the photos transmitted over radio, look at Zond 8 which returned film negatives to Earth.

American videocameras were way superior as well.

Tube cameras Russia used up into 200x were inferior than RCA ones from sixties.

Consumer technology, and monetary incentives make mirracles.

Hard to fathom that today's "supercomputer in the pocket" came out of efforts to build superior gaming PCs, and frag more people in Q3.

Except those american videocameras were probably made in Japan. Sony, Nikon, Ikegami, JVC, ...

There were no Japanese videocameras in sixties

A quick google says you're wrong: https://global.canon/en/c-museum/product/cine253.html

What is it with Internet commenters who are cocksure despite not knowing what they're talking about?

This is not a videocamera

Well, color me embarassed. But why the pivot of the discussion to the video cameras? Maybe to emphasize "America superior"?

What is it with Internet commenters who are cocksure despite not knowing what they're talking about?

I completely agree, I'm sick of people being cocksure about something despite not knowing what they're talking about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikegami_Tsushinki#History

The Russians got the Zeiss factory as spoils of WWII so they made at least some decent optics.

> American videocameras were way superior as well.

I know you didn't phrase it exactly that way.

But we in Sweden are somewhat proud of supplying the Hasselblad cameras to the Apollo missions.

While I greatly dislike the nationalistic undertones in your comment, you are – unlike what some responses claim – not wrong in that the video cameras for the Apollo 11 mission [1] were indeed American and made by Westinghouse [2] and lenses by Fairchild [3]. Not sure how much I would argue that it was “consumer technology” though, at least not at the time.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_TV_camera#Westinghouse_...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westinghouse_Electric_Corporat...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Camera_and_Instrumen...

As for the more famous non-video cameras, they were indeed made by Hasselblad [4] (Sweden) and the lenses by Zeiss [5] (West German). I am of course acutely aware of the latter as I shoot Zeiss lenses and prefer their aesthetics to pretty much anything else I have tried, although these days a chunk of them are made by Cosina [6] (Japan). If you want to dig deeper, I liked Hasselblad’s official homepage on the matter [7].

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasselblad

[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Zeiss_AG

[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosina

[7]: https://www.hasselblad.com/inspiration/history/hasselblad-in...

I've never heard this. I'm not saying it's wrong.

I was told the all the Astronauts were trained on the Hasselblads, and Hasselblads are great cameras--even today.

The great high def pictures were developed on earth, but I'm not sure now.

I remember hearing they came home with hundreds if rolls of film.

The film footage was sent to earth via radio waves, but was grainy.

I am actually more surprised at the Full Robotic rovers on the moon in 1970. India even with modern technology finds it hard to land a rover compared to what soviets did in those days with limited technology is beyond impressive.

The cold war and space race created a magical level of incentive in both the USA and USSR. It makes a lot of modern culture look very petty in contrast.

The incentive still exists, But the entertainment industry has taken the front seat. All that creative energy is now spent making youtube, tiktok videos.

and I don't find anything wrong with that. It would be great if this field would have more creative energy and enthusiasm among general audience, but bashing it on people that are doing something different than what you and I think is better is just wrong.

People are making videos either because they want to or there are greater incentives for that than space fields. The goal should be to create more enthusiasm among people about this field and provide greater incentives to work in this field rather than bashing their fields. What you said in the last sentence reeks of "how the field I like is superior than others".

creative energy =/= tiktok.

i don't know. i see the tiktok generation as druggies who require a daily shot of likes and hearts and shares to feel the adrenaline and dopamine shot. call me old fashioned but i do not have an online presence in my name. I learned from the early days to not give my real name in chat rooms and things carried over from there.

i do not own a youtube/google account and use newpipe so i do not have the urge to "comment" on a video on youtube, or use twitter to voice my opinion. Anyway, what i am getting to us, why doesn't someone like musk re-start the science grassroots level industry across the world? we have things like pi and arduino which are doing their bit in helping re build the hacker culture in the kids but imo its needs more energetic push, across the world.

imagine what kids can do with current tech if they are made to pour their energy from tiktok cringe into science

Interestingly (N == 1), when I abandoned Twitter and Facebook, I started spending a lot more time on HN. Those upvotes are still addictive, even if they come just in numeric form without all the cute icons.

sure but HN has downvotes that act as deterrence to content that is not acceptable to others unlike any other platform where you can only say yayy but not disagree. that has its problems.

i write a comment on HN, then another later. occasionally i check the replies in the comments page that makes me answer but the thread does not go too deep for me. i do not spend "that" much time here.

Those negative thumb downs have great value, i have gotten so much downvotes over the years, that loss in karma has shaped my thinking, i am honestly grateful of those downvotes to clearly shape my thinking. But it largely depends on the kind of forum you are in, thankfully HN is a platform where a mojority saner minds prevail.

All that creative energy is spent on making people addicted to your platform so that you can sell more ads.

The US and USSR collectively had 25 lunar mission failures (not counting successful flybys, orbiters and impactors) before Luna 9 was successfully soft-landed on the moon [1].

India's first attempt at an orbiter was successful, and their first lander mission failed only due to a software issue. I don't think there's enough data yet to say that they "find it hard" compared to the Soviets.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lunar_probes

But, there are no stars in any of the pictures taken on the Moon, the sky is black, even though there is no atmosphere, and these were Hasselblads. There are many beautiful pictures of starry sky taken on Earth, then why no stars show up in the pictures taken on Moon with the best cameras of the time, and no atmospheric interference?

You can test this with a camera at home. Take a single exposure photo of the full moon so that it’s exposed correctly (the looney 11 rule can be helpful), then count how many stars show up.

Couldn't they have taken the picture in the shadow of their capsule and point the camera at the stars? Because of no atmosphere to reflect sunlight I think they could have easily captured beautiful images of brightest stars ever.

Maybe they just didn't think of that. In hindsight that would have been a great thing to do, to show us how sky looks from the Moon. They were scientists after all and they were supposed to document what they saw, including the stars they saw, I would think. And there were multiple missions to Moon. Why didn't anybody think of doing such a simple thing?

I would think that if I were on moon and looked up I would say "Wow I've never seen stars shine so brightly, I better take a picture so I can show folks back home ..."

SEEN: https://www.etsy.com/listing/757288317/milky-way-starry-nigh...

> Couldn’t they have ...

> Why didn't anybody think of doing such a simple thing?

Your second test at home is to take a photo of the stars. Bonus points if you can do it in one photo and with technology that existed in 1969.

There are no stars because the exposure was set for intense sunlight against which stars are many orders of magnitude dimmer. Try photographing stars in a night scene lit by a bright security light - they won't be visible

Yep! Although, that said, I wonder what the astronaut's eyes saw when they were on the surface? Could they see the stars, or were their eyes adjusted to the brightness so much so that they couldn't? I know that they had visors... so maybe?

Yes perhaps. It doesn't make much sense if they were blinded by light on the most important scientific mission ever.

Does anybody know if any of the astronauts were asked in an interview about how the sky and stars looked from the moon?

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