@ Charles Boyer
I was 13 when they landed, I was already into photography. The cameras were modified (tho’ not much, no finder, no leather… they left the aluminum alone, and a special HUGE shutter release, they had to be able to fire the thing.) Hassie 500 ELMs with a superwide lens and 70mm film backs. They only brought the backs home, left the camera bodies there.

At the time Hasselblad had a nice glossy brochure out touting that NASA took their cameras to the moon, and left them there…. free for the taking !!! HAAAA !!!! I might still have the brochure packed away with my 500EL or 500ELM, i’ll have to look for it, if I find it, I’ll send a link to Phil.

True, however, my post was to illustrate the base film to MP equivalent for a well-known format. I would simply do the math from there, it’s fairly easy.

I do wish that the astronauts had been able to haul up and use a Wisner 11×14 view camera, the resultant shots would have been even more stunning!

Don’t sweat it, some/many? of us who lived through the ’60′s/’70′s have grainy or degraded memories.
(FYI, I was 16 at the time of The Landing, and watched the launch on TV until Apollo got to a mile or two altitude, when I went into my back yard… about 40 miles S. of KSC)

J/P=?

It made me realize how interested people around the world were in space and Apollo back then. Here in a semi-communist country, main state owned newspaper published a special issue after special issue about USA and Russian space program.

I don[t know for certain, but I would guess that most of the high quality images were taken with medium format (or larger) film.

Second: My absolute favorite piece of reporting was the headline on the Valparaiso (IN) Vidette-Messinger on July 24th, 1969:

“MOONMEN INVADE EARTH!”

The FBI ran extensive tests and concluded that 35mm 200 ISO film captured about the same amount of information as 16 meg cameras. The numbers rise the lower the ISO and I imagine that NASA photographers at the Cape were using 120mm or higher cameras for a lot of their shots.

But these pictures are a jarring reminder that people just like us, our species, went on the moon. Not some legendary heroes seen only through old, grainy video equipment. But real people.

I think that’s the reason that #24 is my favorite. Just the look on Neil Armstrong’s face. The exhaustion, the exhilaration.

And I agree completely about your comments on imagining the past in b&w. Your comments made sense to me. I’m always slightly jarred when I see, say, a WWII-era color picture.

But these pictures are a jarring reminder that people just like us, our species, went on the moon. Not some legendary heroes seen only through old, grainy video equipment. But real people.

I hope that post made sense, but it probably didn’t. My point was that the picture quality was so good, it showed me a time period that I had never seen before, in a new, clearer way. I guess it’s like how, whenever anyone who was born far after the 50s can seem to only imagine the 50s in black and white. I’ve only imagined the 60s and 70s in grain, but this is a real breath of fresh air to realize that people were still people back then. I hope THAT makes sense. But it probably doesn’t.

Also, read the comments on the site, particularly #102′s comment on the same image, where he claims that it’s not “3 billion” people, because “one side of the Earth is permanently turned towards Moon”.

Chaikin’s books, buttressed with the Mission Reports, backed up by the Spacecraft Film DVDs of the missions in question.

Yeah I think wechoosethemoon.org got overloaded there. Which isn’t really a bad thing to think that many people were interested!

I agree about that quote. I struck me personally, as I am a photographer, and there are times I feel exactly the same way as what Collins said (about the serendipitousness).

I think my favorite is #24 of “Neil Armstrong in the cabin after the completion of the first EVA.” Though #15 is giving it a run for the money.