Just checked (some psychic blather web site) but 1st quarter was on April 13, 1970 (two days after launch), and they got back to Earth on April 17, when the Moon was 3 days short of full. So the the movie should have shown the Moon slowly growing from a wide crescent to gibbous.

Of course as they got close to the Moon and swung around it, it would have actually gotten slimmer until completely dark (some time before losing comms) and then dawn would have come while they were still on the far side. They would have seen a fully illuminated Moon below them for a while (maybe an hour or two) as they swung back towards Earth, which would have then quickly narrowed to the same phase as seen from Earth. This is because for most of the trip, they were very close to the Earth-Moon line and would have seen pretty much the same phase as seen from Earth. The conventional diagrams show their trajectory as a figure 8 with the Earth in the bigger loop and the Moon in the smaller loop, but both are actually much smaller than the distance between them so it is really an extremely drawn-out and flattened figure 8.

… space shuttle Endeavour and a crew of seven astronauts are in orbit.

Looked good!

There are no technical issues being reported by the launch team, and weather conditions continue to improve. Storms to the northwest have dissipated, while a system to the northeast is not interfering with the countdown at this point. At this point, weather is “go” on all constraints.

Looking good!

Dad likes to point out that 13 was rolled out to the pad a long time before it was implied that it was put there for launch, that Ken Mattingly would have been deafened had he watched the launch from where the film says he did, and that North American Rockwell didn’t even exist in 1970, etc.

Anyway, here are a few via http://www.nitcentral.com/oddsends/apollo13.htm. For more, come over to breakfast tomorrow, we’re having a 40th anniversary celebration of the launch of 11 complete with a gathering of old NASA and contractor guys who will drink coffee and tell stories all day. Fascinating stuff.

1. Watch the Paint

The paint pattern for the Saturn V in the film is not accurate. On the lower half of the first stage, the original test model (which never flew) had black-and-white vertical stripes topped with a ring of black paint. All the launched Saturn V’s had the vertical stripes topped with a wider ring of white paint. The movie version omits the ring of paint, and continues to use the stripes.

2. Early Worm

The distinctive NASA “worm” letter logo is seen on a glass window when the astronauts are climbing into their spacesuits. The logo was not developed until 1976. The men of Apollo 13 would have dressed to the old emblem.

3. False Start

The engines of the Saturn V were started a “T minus nine” seconds, not at “T minus zero” as the movie had it. (The hold-down bolts are released at “T minus zero.”) This change was made in the film, apparently, to add drama.

4. Synchronized Swing

The gantry arms for the Saturn V–the support arms that fall away just before liftoff–are released in unison, not one at a time as shown in the film.

5. No Air Bags

The sudden jolt at the separation of the first-stage rocket was completely unexpected, not a routine occurrence as portrayed in the movie. During the actual mission, small retro-rockets on the top of the first stage fired one second too early. This is what threw the astronauts forward as shown in the movie. Truth be told, the real Jim Lovell had several marks on his helmet from banging into the switch guards.

6. Phase Out

The film shows the moon changing phases several times during Apollo 13’s four day journey. There was only one phase, and it was a waning half moon. How come? Apollo 13 was scheduled to land on the left side of the moon and landing was always planned for sunrise, so that long shadows could aid navigation. (Sunrise on the moon, of course, occurs only every 28 days.

7. Night Shift

Upon passing behind the moon, the movie astronauts lose communication with the earth and enter darkness simultaneously. But the far side of the moon and the dark side of the moon are the same only every 28 days. This wasn’t that day.

8. Try An Abacus

If you study what’s written on Tom Hanks’s worksheet, he is doing addition and subtraction to calculate the spacecraft’s orientation angles. The engineers are asked to check his arithmetic, and one uses a slide rule. Anyone handy with a slide rule will tell you it is not used for addition and subtraction.

9. Theory of Relativity

As the film astronauts near the moon, there is a shot (done with models) that shows the sun, the moon and the Apollo spacecraft. Proportionally, the spacecraft appears to be the size of Australia, and traveling at roughly 25 million miles an hour–about a thousand times faster than an actual Apollo craft.

10. Stars Gazing

The astronauts point out the Sea of Tranquillity as they pass over it. The image in the movie is actually Hadley’s Rille (it looks like a river), the landing site of Apollo 15.

11. Fully Impossible

A full moon appears out one window of the lunar module on the way back to earth. Out of a window on the other side, there is a view of the full earth. Full moon, full earth–that would be possible only if the sun were between the moon and the earth (it’s not), or if the module were somewhere near Venus (it wasn’t).

12. Protractors Ready?

At one point, the ship is said to be rotating at 2.5 degrees per second. The view out the window shows the earth moving past at about five times that rate. For comparison, the second hand on a clock rotates at 6 degrees per second.

13. A Silent Vacuum

Outside the capsule, the propulsion jets are roaring. In the vacuum of space, however, propulsion jets do not make any noise whatsoever–unless you are very, very close to them, in which case you would be a cinder. (Note from Phil: No sound in a vacuum, eh? That sounds familiar! Wink, wink.)

However lightning is a wiley phenomenon, and the shuttle electronics are very very complex. It’s simple prudence after seeing a strike like that to do as much of an inspection and test as you can afford. There’s always the possibility that some wiring got inductively coupled to the grounding wire from the tower (a nearby strike generates a *big* magnetic field) and was routed somewhere that was missed in the EMI analysis. Better to spend a day or so now checking things out, than to later on be wishing you had.

Really cool pic though.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25768418-2,00.html

My first impression when I saw that picture was “holy &*#!, lightning struck the launchpad?” Say it ain’t so! I would’ve thought that NASA would err on the side of caution and make sure all the electrics on board are ship-shape before launch. Just a thought.