In some ways the events that surrounded Apollo 12 sound like they really did come from a script. Three Navy personal, launched in a storm, heading for the area of the moon known as the Ocean of Storms, and then returning to Earth and landing in a stormy ocean the parallels are uncanny. Yet really the rest of the mission was often mundane, the crew working hard at getting through the science and goals that come with being the first real mission to land on the moon. If not for the humour and good nature of this crew, Apollo 12 might have gone down as a tedious mission. Perhaps the public decided that it was anyway, because it was certainly the last mission to really create the awe of Apollo 8 and 11.

A Stormy Beginning

By the astronaut crew rotation roster, the backup crew for Apollo 9 would be the crew for Apollo 12. The original crew was Mission Commander, Commander Charles "Pete" Conrad (USN), Lunar Module Pilot, Major Clifton "C. C" Williams (USMC), and Command Module Pilot Commander Richard Francis “Dick” Gordon, Jr. (USN). Tragedy was to strike the team though and on the 5th of October 1967, C. C Williams was killed when the control system on his T-38 failed crashing the plane. Although a Gemini Astronaut, having flown with Williams on Gemini X, Commander Alan Bean (USN) had not made the initial list of Apollo Astronauts and as such had been placed in to the Apollo Applications Unit instead. But with the death of Williams he would get his chance to walk on the moon and he was reassigned as Williams' replacement, taking his place as the new backup Lunar Module Pilot for Apollo 9. It was this team that would then continue on together to fly on Apollo 12 and they remembered Williams with the addition of a fourth star on the mission patch.

Preparations for the launch were reasonably good; the major problem that was experienced was a leak in the CSM Helium number two tank. This had resulted in a six-hour delay as it was switched out and retanked, though shortening the T-9 hour hold by those six hours made up this delay and allowed for the launch to stay on time, something that was critical for this launch due to its primary mission, to land a LM with almost pinpoint accuracy near Surveyor 3. Any delays in their launch window would have resulted in a month long delay to the flight, and the programme. The launch was also the first, and only Apollo launch to be witnessed by a sitting President. With these pressures and a slow moving cold front created rainstorm sitting over the launch area, the decision to waive Manned Space Flight Center Launch Mission Rule 1-404, "The vehicle will not be launched when its flight path will carry it through a cumulonimbus (thunderstorm) cloud formation," was waived allowing to the rocket to fly, despite the storm.

So it was that at 11:22 am on the 14th November, 1969, the Saturn V carrying Apollo 12 lifted off the A launch pad of Launch Complex 39. A bumpy ride suddenly got a lot more bumpy when just seconds after the Saturn V had conducted its roll, numerous systems suddenly failed. Watching on the ground, the spectators had seen the cause, a brilliant flash of lightning has struck the rocket as it ascended, followed shortly after by a second just fifteen seconds later. With the command module systems dead, and no way of knowing exactly how serious the damage was, the crew held their nerve and the Mission Commander "We just lost the platform, gang. I don't know what happened here; we had everything in the world drop out," then waiting for instructions before deciding if he had to activate the escape rocket. On the ground the mission controllers were trying to establish what had gone wrong.

With the rocket still operating normally, the flight controllers let the flight continue as they worked the problem. They had the crew reconnect the fuel cells, which brought their systems back up, but the telemetry was still scrambled, many sensor feeds reporting incomplete and possible inaccurate date making it unusable. John Aaron, the EECOM for the launch figured that the problem might be in the craft's Signal Condition Equipment. The job of the SCE was to convert the information from the ship's sensors into useful information for the telemetry and onboard indicators. Aaron's reasoning was that the electrical disturbance that had forced the fuel cells offline would have done the same to the SCE. As such he called for the crew to "Try SCE to Aux" to reset it, a command that few in mission control or on board Apollo 12 remembered or even knew how to do. Luckily one member of the crew did remember the switch from a training exercise over a year earlier, and so Alan Bean reset the SCE and the telemetry signal was restored, with the only loss, nine non-essential sensors. With the Telemetry working once more, the flight continued normally, and Apollo 12 arrived in Earth Orbit just under twelve minutes after launch.

Fly Me To The Moon

Once orbit had been established there was a short debate on the ground. No one was entirely sure id the pyrotechnics that would deploy the CM's parachutes for landing would have been damaged by the lightning strikes, and so there was a possibility that they might fail on re-entry. In the end it was decided that if they had been then it wouldn't matter if the crew re-entered immediately, or after having been to the moon. As such the mission was to proceed as planned and after just one and a half orbits the Saturn IVB booster was fired to put the craft into what was termed a "hybrid" non-free-return trajectory, one in which if the craft failed to enter lunar orbit it would have to be nudged back onto a return trajectory, but this would be easily possible with the use of the Descent Module engine and the CSM reaction system.

Around half an hour after entering the translunar phase of the mission, Dick Gordon separated the CSM, named the Yankee Clipper, from the Saturn booster, and pivoted it about to face the LM, called Intrepid. He then slowly moved towards the LM and successfully docked with it before activating the ejection mechanism and floating free of the third stage booster. Mission control activated the booster and moving it way from Apollo 12, fired it engines to use up the remaining fuel and to place it into what was meant to be a solar orbit. Due to a longer than planned burn however, the rocket failed to pass the moon close enough to gain the required energy to enter solar orbit and instead it entered a long elliptical Earth-Moon orbit where it remained for around two years before finally being caught into a solar orbit. It was likely last seen in around June of 2003 after it was once more recaptured by the Earth's gravity. The previous September it had been named J002E3 when Bill Yeung had sighted what he thought was an asteroid from his observatory in Arizona. It proceeded to loop about the Earth about once every fifty days over the following ten months before returning once more to a solar orbit. There is more than possible that we will encounter the Apollo 12 Saturn IVB stage again as it travels through space, estimations being sometime in 2032.

Like all the of the Apollo missions, the environment of the Apollo 12 CSM and LM was what was called a "shirt sleeves" environment. This meant that unlike Mercury and Gemini, apart from during launch, docking and undocking, and landing, the astronauts did not have to wear their suits all the time, and most of the flight they were actually just in their overalls just like today's Space Shuttle crews. This environment was achieved by using pure oxygen, but rather than having it at normal sea level pressure, it was only at a little above the partial pressure of oxygen at sea level, that is, what our atmosphere would be if we removed all the Nitrogen, Carbon Dioxide and other trace gases leaving only the oxygen. While this environment lead to some rather bizarre antics from the Apollo 12 crew, such as wearing beanie hats with propellers on them and telling the viewers of their 53 minute long broadcast that they used them to get around in the weightless environment of space, it has also lead to one of the more bizarre Apollo Camera hoax claims.

Hoax Claims: The pure oxygen atmosphere in the Apollo module would have melted or the Hasselblad's camera covering and produced poisonous gases. Why weren't the astronauts affected?

History Claims: The Apollo Hasselblad camera was coated in chromium so as to give it heat-reflecting properties. Chromium, like any other metal does not melt in the presence of oxygen, pure or not.

This claims truly shows the lack of research so often found with hoax claims. It also originally came in a slightly different form. Rather than melting, the originators of the claim stated that the standard leatherette coverings that the Hasselblad comes with would "outgas" and cause annoying or poisonous fumes in the CSM causing the astronauts discomfort. While this may or may not be true (I don't know of any experiments to either confirm or disprove the claim) it really is irrelevant simply because the covers were all removed from the cameras before their flights, revealing the chrome plated metal underneath. This was done so that the camera would reflect much of the infrared light hitting it and so take longer to heat up. Without the covers on the camera, they could neither outgas nor melt.

During their TV broadcast, Bean and Conrad entered the LM and set excellent images of the interior back to the audiences in the US. Otherwise, the coast to the moon was a rather quiet affair and the crew often used humour to keep the mood light. During basic "housekeeping" activities Houston was told that they had forgotten to install the housekeeper and later after entering lunar orbit and taking images of Fra Mauro, the projected landing place of Apollo 13, Conrad quipped, "You can tell good Captain Shaky (James Lovell) to relax, we got his photos."

The Snowman Awaits

Over 104 hours after launch, Pete Conrad, and then Alan Bean moved over into the LM, and then started to don their suit and prepare Intrepid for the next stage of the mission. Nearly three hours later, and sixty-three nautical miles above the lunar surface, The Yankee Clipper and Intrepid undocked and moved apart. Apollo 12 was a go for landing, and after Apollo 11's rather embarrassing off target set down, this time it had to be precise. Somewhere below them was a crater pattern called the Snowman. There rested Surveyor 3, and Conrad and Bean had just one chance to land nearby to prove it could actually be done.

Things for a precision landing didn't go well to start out the best when it was discovered that Intrepid was on a course five nautical miles north of its correct line. Pete Conrad was a little worried by the position, unsure of how it would affect their recognition of the landing zone, and worse, where it would put them while flying through several mountain ranges. The last thing they needed while trying for a precision landing was to fly the LM right into a mountain. This resulted in Mission Control having to determine a new course for the LM to get them back on track, and as such lead to a rather dangerous reprogramming of the LM's targeting system even as they were descending. The targeting change was, however, made with the skill and ability that had come from long hours in the simulators practicing almost every possible scenario the simulation team could think of.

Most of the way down, the crew allowed the LMs navigation computer to control the descent along the programmed path. While the LM couldn't land by remote control, much of the landing was done automatically with the crew merely supervising and entering the right data into the computer, or setting the correct circuit breakers and switches throughout the landing. This automated descent was done as a series of hard-coded programs that resided on RAM chips in the computer. P63 was the code for the first part of the descent, controlling the craft's braking and the start of the descent. This was done in a "feet forward" position with the crew's backs towards the moon. Around seven thousand feet above the moon's surface, and with the LM's speed reduced considerably, the computer would automatically switch into P64. This would pitch the LM forward into a "feet down" position allowing the crew to now see the moon. It would continue in this mode until the computer was placed into P66, the program that allowed the Commander to attempt a manual landing, or P65, which would separate the Ascent and Descent stages of the LM, and abort the mission.

Seconds after pitch over, Pete spotted the area of craters that had been termed the Snowman. The computer had targeted them exactly as planned and was taking them right down the middle of it. At seven hundred feet Pete Conrad switched the computer to P66 and took control of the LM, cutting the rate of descent further to give himself time to look at the landing area and choice the best spot to set the craft down. For Al, who had only been in the simulator before, the ride was a little nerve racking, though he hung on and read the gauges for this Commander. To Pete, the ride was remarkably similar to that he has experienced with the LLTV and handled in a very similar manner. Because only the Commanders got to fly the LLTV and LLRV, Al had never experienced the sense of movement that come with the actual flight, and so was unprepared for the ability to perform what seemed large corrections and changes of direction in the low lunar gravity.

Coming Down In A Cloud Of Dust

At between two and three hundred feet, Conrad arrested the last of the forward motion and put the LM into a hover. At this point the exhaust started to pick up the dust, blowing it across the lunar surface and began to obscure the crew's view of the surface itself. This phenomenon had been observed on Apollo 11 as well, though Conrad described that he felt that they had more dust that the previous flight. Because of the moving cloud of dust, the rocks and craters were hidden from view and Conrad feared that they might set down onto top of one. Still, one hundred and ten hours, thirty-two minutes and thirty-five seconds into the mission, Al called "contact" and Conrad cut the engine, letting the LM fall for the final six feet of the descent. With a bump that was to get Conrad teased the the air force pilots about "navy landings," they were down, and while the crew was yet to learn of exactly were they had landed, they had indeed achieved their goal; the LM was now sitting just a hundred and sixty metres from their goal, Surveyor 3.

Hoax Claims: There was no dust on the lunar module's feet, how is this possible when Armstrong and others stated that the dust obscured their view of the surface while landing?

History Claims: On the moon there is no atmosphere for the dust to billow about in, so it acts in a different manner to how it would on Earth, moving directly away from the engine. This means that there is no dust floating about to land on the pads.

Sometimes what happens on the moon is really counter-intuitive to what we know so well on Earth. This often leads many hoax arguments down the road of poor science and misunderstanding, the dust on the LM's pads in one such argument. As Intrepid come down for a landing, just as with as with the Eagle, the main engine started to affect the dust while they were about thirty metres above the surface. As the engine's exhaust hit the surface it would start to lift the dust and move it with the flow. On Earth because of our atmosphere as the particles interact with the air, their motion is arrested and the smaller ones float, making this movement is very much random and chaotic meaning that dust will form a cloud that would billow up and about. Without any atmosphere to act as resistance to the exhaust and dust, the surface merely redirected the flow so that it has to follow Newton's First Law of Motion, and will just flow across the top of the surface as shown in the diagram provided. This lack of interaction resulted in the dust cloud from engines "sheeting" across the lunar surface rather than "billowing" up and around the LM like we would see on Earth with a Harrier Jump Jet or a helicopter. In the debriefing after Apollo 11, Armstrong stated:

In his debriffing after the Apollo 12 mission, Pete Conrad noted how far away the sheet extended from his vantage point in the LM, saying:

Because this sheet of dust is moving away from the craft, once the engine is switched off, it continues on following a ballistic curve across the ground until it lands, some distance from the craft. For most of the missions, the feet of the LM were around six feet above the surface when the engine was stopped, as they had six foot landing probes on them to alert the crew to once they had contact. When the contact light appeared the pilot would cut the engine and let the LM drop the last few feet to the lunar surface. Since the pads did not hit the surface until after the engine was off, the dust "sheet" was already gone, and simply there was no dust floating about that could have landed on them. This sheet of dust blown away by the LM's descent engine actually travelled quite some distance from the LM's landing position, Conrad and Bean discovering later that they had caused a layer of dust to cover Surveyor 3, even though they had landed just over a hundred and sixty metres from it.

Camera Troubles

Both Astronauts reported that early on, moving about was rather hard to get used too, and that it took them time to adjust to both the soft ground underfoot and the low gravity. As Al was getting used to walking about, Conrad decided to leave the TV camera he had been in the process of removing prior to Al Bean exiting the LM. Instead he started to erect the large S-Band antenna leaving the TV camera to Al to deploy once he'd got his feet settled in. This decision was to lead to their first bit of camera trouble on the mission.

The Apollo 11 TV pictures were lousy, yet the broadcast quality magically became fine on the five subsequent missions.

The later missions involved improved cameras, improved techniques on the ground to reduce signal noise and most of all, the crews had more time to erect independent transmitters on the moon rather than transmitting through the limited resources of the LM.

For Apollo 11, the TV camera was almost an after thought. No one had really thought about the need to televise the landing as a live event and so when it was decided, the systems in place weren't the best. Added to this were several other factors. The low light black and white camera meant that it would need to have a light filter fitted once it was placed away from the LM. The signal was to be broadcast through the LM's S-Band transmitter along with the LM's own data stream, a result that meant that the signal had to be compressed further. This meant that the signal being received at the tracking stations was not as high in quality as a normal TV signal, however it was to get worse. The camera signal had been designed to work on the low bandwidth by cutting the number of frames per second from 30 to 10, and decreasing the number of scans taken from 525 to 320. These changes, along with the Black and White camera reduced the signal to just 5% of a standard colour camera, but at a cost in the clarity of the image, and more importantly, in the fact that the signal being received could no longer be played on a standard TV set. Because of this, the signal being received was played onto a slow scan screen at the tracking station and a standard NTSC camera was positioned to record and transmit that image being displayed to Houston, where it was feed on to the stations for broadcast. While this was the easiest and most common way to transform one standard to another (in fact it was still used into the late 1980's to convert between PAL and NTSC formats) it degraded the signal further resulting in a poor and ghostly image. Today the images are even more degraded because what we are seeing is a digitised version of kinescope archive footage of that broadcast, so there have been several more format changes. A further problem, the contrast incorrectly set on the scanner at the Goldstone Tracking Station, also caused the image to be much darker than it should have been. It was these problems all combined that lead to the poor quality of Apollo 11's TV images.

In the later missions the cameras that were improved, and because the crews had longer on the surface, they were able to erect the larger S-Band antenna (on 12, 13 and 14, though of course 13 didn't manage this) or use the Rover's antenna on the J-missions (15, 16 and 17.) which meant that they signal was far stronger and clearer, added to this, the engineers and communications people continuously used the information from the previous mission to work out better ways build the cameras and to clean up the signal noise from the transmission so the picture quality improved over each subsequent mission. Of course, sometimes, even using a better camera didn't always help.

Back to Apollo 12, Al was to deploy the TV camera, placing it to view the LM. During this procedure he accidentally pointed the camera at the sun, and as a result it burned out the sensitive vidicon in the top of the camera. When this happened, the TV signal was lost, the top of the image just appearing bright white, while the lower part was black (though this part still worked, the blackness was due to the camera locking into a high light setting, so the images the lower vidicons were sending were simply too dark to see.) Though they did a number of things to attempt to restore the image, including Al hitting it with his geology hammer, nothing could be done to fix it and as such there is very little TV footage of Apollo 12. Because of this, all missions after 12 carried a back up camera in case their primary one was damaged. The vidicons were also changed in the later cameras so that if they were subjected to any intense light they would simply shut down rather than burning out as the Apollo 12 one had. This resulted in cameras that could be pointed at the sun without harm, and such situations are common in the TV footage from Apollo 15, 16 and 17 where the rover cameras were operated via remote from Earth.

NASA claims to have lost the original unseen Apollo 11 footage meaning no one can examine it closely.

All of the tracking stations recorded the data being sent from the Apollo craft onto backup tapes in case something was lost in transmission. In the course of filing and refiling the backup tapes, they have been achieved in a less that careful manner, and so it is currently unknown to exactly where they are.

A search is currently on (as of December 2006) for the original slow scan Apollo 11 tapes as these will be free of the deterioration in quality caused by the changes between formats. If these tapes could be retrieved, the footage from Apollo 11 could be processed digitally from a more "pure quality" source. These tapes do not include any "unseen" footage, but rather the footage we have as it appeared to the controllers at the tracking stations prior to the conversion to the NTSC standard for TV broadcast. This means that the images that could be gained from these tapes would lack the lost of contrast about the outer parts of the image, and should be clearer in respect to image artefacts and ghosting that were introduced during the transformation, broadcasting and archiving of the footage we have today.

There were no viewfinders on the lunar cameras and yet all the lunar photographs are in focus, well framed, exposed and just too far too good; they all look like they were professionally taken rather than by inexperienced astronauts. How can this be possible?

All Astronauts had a lot of training and experience in using the cameras before they went to the moon so understood how to use them effectively even without a viewfinder. Not all of the photos are well framed, in focus or perfect either. There are many examples of poor photos in the Apollo record since they just are rarely seen since they are not good magazine copy.

With the TV camera on Apollo 12 damaged, and so no TV images, the footage from the DAC and the photos taken by the astronauts became critical to having a visual record of the mission. Luckily, all of the Apollo astronauts had extremely intensive training on using the Hasselblad cameras they would be taking to the moon. At the start of the space missions very little thought had been given to photographing the environment of space. When John Glenn launched in Freedom Seven he carried with him a small camera that had been brought at a local Florida store and then hastily modified so that he was able to use it while wearing his space suit.

With photography being more important and with its role in the use of unmanned probes, satellites and then during the Gemini program, space photography had matured a great deal by the late 1960's and for Apollo it was realised very quickly that good photos were going to be very important in showing scientists what they needed about the lunar surface. Because of this, the Apollo astronauts were all given training cameras much like the ones they would be using on the moon. They were then encouraged to take them everywhere and take as many photos as they could. From family outings to the geology field trips to the canyons of Nevada, the volcanoes of Hawaii and the artificial crater field made for their training at Cinder Lake, the more photos the better. Each time they completed a magazine it was take to be processed, and then as part of the training they would go through the images to see how they could have been improved.

The following 1991 Mission Review conversation with Pete Conrad and Alan Bean found on the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal is quite enlightening about the photography taken and the practice put in to it by the crews.

By the time of the Apollo missions, the astronauts had gained at least three years experience using the cameras without a viewfinder, those on the later missions had in the order of six years experience. With all this training, and the fact that the cameras were made to be operated as simply as possible, basically they only had to point the camera in the right direction and press a button, it should not be surprising that the photos are for the most part reasonably good.

They aren't perfect through, far from it. Many of the images used in publicity shots have been rotated, cropped and even adjusted in ways to make them more visually pleasing. An example of this is probably the most famous shot of all, Aldrin as "The Man On the Moon." In this shot Armstrong only just avoided cutting off the top of Aldrin's head, and indeed did so the top right corner of the PLSS. Most of the shots seen in magazines and books add a black of black above Aldrin, and cut off the bottom to centre him in the image. They also often rotate the image to make his square to frame, and on occasions some have even added the Earth to the background (if the real photo you can just make out the blue dot that is the Earth reflected on Aldrin's visor.) However such alterations of NASA images are not proof of the originals being faked, merely that publishers don't think the originals were good enough for marketing without making changes. This very action proves that the bulk of the images taken were not of the professional quality the Hoax Proponents claim they were.

In fact occasionally Apollo 12's photography was not a lot better then some of the shots from Apollo 11 (and other missions), however the major difference between these poor photos and the better known ones is that those that are poorly exposed, framed or focused simply never make it into a book or magazine and so only appear in the archives and are not as well known publicly. If does not take very long to discover some of these though, and below are a selection taken by Alan Bean and Pete Conrad during their Apollo 12 Moonwalks.

The temperature on the Moon during the day is 250°C. Experiments show that film exposed to that temperature melts into a little ball. With the Radiation on the moon all the film would have been exposed and foggy.

The temperature on the moon varies depending on what is measured and when. 250°C is the hottest temperature and is what the surface of the moon will reach after over a week in direct sunlight. The film was designed to withstand high temperatures and never reached any extremes anyway. Finally, the amount of radiation in the lunar environment is overstated and while some images do show hits by Cosmic Rays, on the whole the magazine canisters were enough to block the low levels that exist there.

Deploying ALSEP

While Apollo 11 had only set up a small scientific package consisting of two experiments, Apollo 12 was to deploy an entire Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP). With it being the first full package, it was unsurprising that Pete and Al had numerous problems getting the equipment deployed correctly. Guide tubes that were meant to assist Pete in undoing the bolts that held the package together proved to be more of a hindrance on the moon when the absence of reflected light from the sky resulted in the bolts being in pitch black darkness caused by the tubes shadow. This problem meant that Pete could not see what he was doing and couldn't tell if the bolts were coming loose or not. Cables that had been coiled up for the journey to the moon refused to lie flat on the surface in the 1/6th gravity, meaning that the crew had to be extra careful, especially when they couldn't see their feet because of the suits. Tripping on a cable loop was a very serious possibility and in a later mission such an incident ruined one experiment.

Dust was a major problem during the deployment. Every time the crew made a step they would kick dust up, the grains travelling a substantial distance. This meant that even walking towards one of the experiment packages was likely to cover it in dust, even when they were some way away from them, when they were close, it seemed almost impossible to stop them getting covered in the material. On the recommendation of the Apollo 12 crew, later crews were to carry brushes to allow them to clean the dust from their experimental packages, suits and camera. For the Apollo 12 crew who had nothing to help, each step simply made their experimental package, and themselves dustier, to the point that Pete Conrad told Houston that they looked like they had just crawled out of a coal bin. As all the experiments, two gave them the greatest trouble. One was the Suprathermal Ion Detector Experiment (SIDE) that was to measure the energy and mass spectra of any positive ions found close to the lunar surface after having been created by various suspected sources. A side component to the SIDE was the Cold Cathode Ion Gauge. This was a simple atmosphere detector, designed to test if the moon had an atmosphere, and if so, how much. It was so sensitive that it was able to detect when the astronauts walked nearby just from the outgassing of their PLSS. The major problem with these experiments was that they were rather poorly designed to stand up under 1/6 earth gravity. A heavy cable connected the two, and it would not lie flat, but rather twisted forcing the CCIG to fall over regardless of how the crew positioned it. Finally, mostly out of frustration, Pete simply laid it on its side facing away from the LM to prevent its detector being overcome by the rocket's exhaust on take off. Al was also having trouble with the seismometer, which was supposed to have been placed on a flat solid part of the ground. Without anything but dust in the ALSEP deployment area, he made the decision to compact the ground with his boot as best as he could, though this just made more dust fly up and cover both him and the seismometer. Getting the skirt that was supposed to keep the ground about the base in shade also cause trouble when it delaminated, and he had to gather up the discarded Boyd bolts from the two packages and drop them onto the skirt to hold it down.

The largest trouble they had with the ALSEP however was right at the start of the unpacking, and very nearly spelled doom to the entire science package. The experiments were run from a central power station that used a RTG, which run off a Plutonium element that was to be inserted into it by the crew. The fuel element was kept in a canister stored in a cask on the side of the LM and Al was to open this, remove the fuel canister and place it into the RTG. What had not been realised however was that the fuel element would heat up the canister itself on the journey and cause it to expand inside the cask. Because of this oversight, when Al attempted to remove the canister it just would not move. Worried that he might break the tool he needed for the extraction, Al was very much at a loss on how to get the canister out, and without it, there could be no power for the experimental package they were supposed to deploy. Once more the trusty hammer came to the fore, and Pete managed to loosen the grip that the cask had on the canister by thumping it on the side. With each pounding, the canister moved a bit, and after it had come about an inch, the seal broke and it slid free. This incident resulted in the redesign of the fuel cask on the later missions. One of the properties of the cask was that in case of an abort above Earth, it had to survive the re-entry. This forethought proved valuable at the end of the next mission, Apollo 13, when Aquarius re-entered and parts, including its cask, crashed into the Pacific Ocean near the Tongan Trench.

Once the crew had managed to get the ALSEP set up they had a short time for some geology, taking images of strange "volcanic-looking" mounds created when chunks of dirt and rock had fallen after one of the large impacts. They also collected a number of rocks and did a short visit to a massive old crater that was nearby. There they collected a few bedrock samples and took photos before Houston demanded they return, forcing them to run all the way back to the LM for packing up and close out of the first EVA. As Pete packed up the tools and samples that had been collected, Al took a quick soil core sample and moved the TV Camera for Houston. They then headed back into the LM, Al first and then after Pete had sent up the sample bag, he joined his LMP. The first EVA had lasted just under four hours.

Surveying The Surveyor

Why did so many NASA Moonscape photos have non-parallel shadows? Sceptics say it is because there are two sources of light on the Moon - the Sun and the Earth. Even if that is so, the shadows should still all fall in the same direction, not two or three different angles, and besides, Earthshine would have no effect during the bright lunar day (the time at which the Apollo was on the Moon).

Why do so many everyday Earth bound photos have non-parallel shadows? This isn't at all a case of Earthshine, but rather of parallax, distance foreshortening, and vanishing points. This phenomena can easily be observed in everyday life and anyone that has ever done art knows all about using vanishing points for parallel lines.

There are many images from Apollo that show as having "non-parallel" shadows, and it is probably one of the most repeated arguments in favour of a hoax. However does it really check out? The proponents of a Hoax all claim that since there is only one light source the shadows would be parallel, and parallel lines should be parallel in all the images. Rather unsurprisingly, this is a very easy claim to test and the results are quite different to those claimed by those who claim that these shadows are evidence of multiple light sources. Below are some free images I located on the net. As you can see they are of railway tracks. Now we all know that railway tracks must be parallel or else they won't work, but look at the picture. In the first two we are looking down the tracks. See how they appear to converge as they get further away from the camera. The last is of the sleepers under the tracks; again notice the convergence of the sleepers and even the footpath over the tracks. This is created by perspective. Now we can compare it to the Apollo Images. Here I have selected some from Apollo 12 showing the shadows of the LM and the S-Band along with the astronaut taking the image. As you can see they converge in exactly the same manner as the railway tracks and sleepers did in the previous images. Note in the second image, that the flag's shadow and astronuat's shadows are nearly in a straight line with each other and are very close to parallel, exactly as we would expect from parallax.

Another phenomena that affects the way we see things is Distance Foreshortening. This is because objects that are further away subtend less of an angle than objects that are close. For example, if we were to place two one metre rulers on the floor, one 100m away and one just 10m away, for a 1.8m tall person (6 foot) the close ruler would subtend an angle of 0.92° of their vision. The far ruler would only subtend a 0.01° angle making it look just a few centimetres long. The width of an item is not foreshortened however and so a shadow that is long and narrow to someone standing close to it will look short and fat to a distant observer. This often fools people looking at an image into thinking that a shadow is pointing in a direction it isn’t, simply because it looks to be wider than it is long and so they assume that the greater distance represents the direction the shadow is pointing. Just by looking at photos of everyday things we quickly can find that when we convert a 3D world into a 2D image, that many of the things we taken for granted when viewing the world appear strange in a photo. As I write this I can look along the hall of my workplace. The carpet has red squares set in in a grid patern, each about half a metre apart from those around it. This makes it look to me as if they are set into parallel lines that run down the hallway. Not only do they appear to converge as they go down the hallway, but those at the far end all appear to be right next to next ones in the line, with only a gap of a few centimetres between them. These illusions are exactly what we see in the Apollo images and in photos of the real world as well. Just looking about us, examples are in fact very easy to find, so it is amazing that this argument is so commonly used. Does it mean that most of the Hoax Proponents simply don't bother taking notice of the world around them? Or do they know that their claim doesn't stack up and simply don't care about the truth of it?

The astronauts could not have operated the camera or wound the film with gloves on.

The cameras were specially modified for the Astronauts to use. A larger button on the front allowed for a gloved finger to trigger it. The focus distance, aperture and shutter speed were all set using large flaps attached to the dials, which were designed to locked into preset positions so that the astronauts merely had to push the flap to roughly the right place and it would click into the correct position. The Apollo Hasselblads all has electronic winders, so the film was automatically wound forward on taking a picture allowing a second to be taken within a second or so.

During all of the moonwalks it was required to operate the cameras easily and to change magazines, however this was not as hard as is often made out. The magazines were about the size of a fist, and could be manipulated on and off the back of the camera with reasonable ease. During one of the EVAs for Apollo 15 we see Dave Scott change his camera's magazine right in front of the TV camera, so we have proof that such was not impossible. The cameras themselves had been extensively modified for the Apollo use. The shutter release button, which is positioned on the front of the camera, had been almost doubled in size so that all that the astronaut had to do was get his finger on the front of the camera to press it. This made it easier for them to take the photos. Another modification was to the lens setting rings. These had to be manipulated by turning them to the appropriate setting, a trick that was very difficult to accomplish with gloves on. The solution was simply though. Because they were unlikely to need a great number of settings, the rings were set up with predetermined positions where they would "lock" into position and then have to have extra force applied to shift them again. The second change to the rings was to add large "paddles" to them so that they could be moved with the side of the hand rather then requiring the astronaut to attempt to do fiddly work on the thin rings. With these two major modifications the camera was relatively easy to apply the settings and press the button to take a photo.

To make things even easier for the crews, the Apollo cameras were the Hasselblad EL. This version had an automatic electronic winder that wound the film into position and tightened it for the next shot. This process would take about a second to occur allowing for reasonably rapid-fire shots by the Astronauts if they wished to do so. Again in the David Scott footage, we see him take a number of images winding the film into position. During this we see the film being automatically wound.

The final modification to the camera was to the magazine. Usually these would have what are called Dark Slides. These protected the film from being exposed. They were removed once the magazine was in place and reinserted before it was removed. On Apollo the Dark Strips had large loops attached which allowed the crew to easily remove them, however since they would be almost impossible to re-insert these were then discarded. As a result many of the final images on the rolls suffer seriously from sun strike.

The Apollo 12 crew did have one piece of unofficial camera equipment on board with them. They had managed to smuggle a small Hasselblad timer with them, and during their time at Surveyor 3 they were planning to take this from the sample bag and attach it to one of the cameras. They had practiced this a number of times in training and Alan Bean had never had any trouble finding it. On the moon it was a different story. Unable to locate the timer they abandoned the idea and so instead of having a unique picture of two astronauts on the moon the only time we gat too see both is in the TV or 18mm DAC footage.

Ironically just as they were packing up to enter Intrepid for the final time, Pete Conrad found the timer, but neither of them thought of taking the picture there, and Al just threw the timer away.

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