It's fascinating how the pictures have that "Apollo moon landing" look. I'd always assumed that a huge part of this was just 1960s technology (film not digital etc), but apparently it's actually coming from the literally unearthly lighting conditions of being on the Moon.
Still photography has gotten more convenient since then, but in the agreeable lighting and atmospheric conditions one would encounter while taking a vacation snap outside at noon Cynthian time, image quality now isn't better than then*
OP is comparing photography tech that made it to the Moon, so not cheap tech. The "special" way the photos look like is probably more a product of the environment than just the equipment.
Once SpaceX gets Starship launching weekly, it'll probably be cheaper to send a bot with a camera to the moon than to rent a sound stage and build a big set!
that's a great point about the lighting... it really does contribute to that distinctive look. i've also read that the lack of atmosphere on the moon sharpens the shadows and increases the contrast, which probably adds to that effect.
It was a medium format camera; it's going to be good camera at any point.
I think it had a 7x7cm film - that's a humongous, 49cm^2 sensor compared to a regular full-frame camera, which clocks in at 8.64cm^2. As far as I can tell, the iPhone's is a tiny 0.25cm^2.
Combine with no-holds-barred lenses and you're bound to get fantastic pictures even six decades ago.
To be fair, the optical light gathering ability of a full frame f/1.4 lens is slightly better than that of the Hasselblad 80mm f/2.8, and modern digital sensors have eclipsed 6x6 film in every respect, such as resolution, sensitivity, and indeed even dynamic range. Photo technology has in fact progressed a fair bit in the last half a century.
Of course, nothing can touch the light gathering ability of that Zeiss 50mm f/0.7, but then that lens wasn't very sharp anyway and modern digital sensors can go up to way higher ISO than possible with film while still making decent pictures.
I am no expert, but to my knowledge the space flight tech evolves very slowly, if at all. One reason for that is that modern tech is supposedly too sensitive to radiation. So you want to balance what's worthwhile to upgrade, and fancy videos are probably low on that list.
The paper is 12 years old. If there haven't been other methods to evaluate modern commercial tech, then it's an actual proof of tech evolving slowly due to radiation concerns. Even the process pointed out in the paper requires resources, but it just got a bit faster in the last years.
Apart from that, adding new components is also costly. You just don't order a random megapixel camera from alibaba and slam it on your 1bn space project.
Considering I made clear that i am no expert and my claims were under that context your response was simply arrogant and not helpful.
Well, you were the one telling me "space tech evolves slowly", when Apollo was taking their pictures with a film coconut, Firefly is using a digital apple, and yet the output still looks eerily similar.
Hopefully you can see that from a raw tech level, there's practically no overlap between those things at all. The technology has moved on _completely_.
I'm familiar with the Mariner camera. It's pretty fascinating. There obviously no way to return film from a Mars flyby, so they had to take a digital approach. But the technology was so crude in 1965 that they literally had to paint the "digital" images by hand in order to get a visual output. It's a fascinating story.
Suffice it to say that this technique has essentially no relation to today's digital cameras, apart from using electrons or something. The Apollo missions did not use digital cameras; they used film, which could produce superb high-resolution images, provided you could return it to Earth.
You can actually learn things in this forum, if you listen to people who know what they're talking about.
You simply dumped me with the inane digital / analog hint. Like I missed that transition. Excuse me? YOU started to talk about analog photography, just to make me look like an idiot.
Just saying it uses digital photography doesn't give me any clue. Is the tech bleeding edge or 20 years old?
My initial argument was that it takes time to add new tech to space flight, due to radiation concerns. Your argument is that they use digital tech now. Which doesn't disprove my point, nor does it point out any mistakes I made.
we get a taste of this light when out in the countryside when it's a full moon. Very bright but cold light. Full, hard shadows. Just black and white. No diffraction, no softness.
It's like many of the current LED car and street lights.
How would that work? The hardness of the light on the moon is because the moon has no atmosphere. Moonlight at night is still affected by the atmosphere in the same way sunlight is.
It's because the moonlight is comparatively dim. Even when your eyes have fully adjusted there is a threshold below which you just can't pick up the light. The scattered moonlight is below your detection threshold so the shadows appear completely black. Your color cones are also less sensitive than the black and white rods, so colors are muted or even missing and you are left with a landscape of stark greys just like the moon.
These pictures are great - maybe it's time for me to get a new desktop background.
Kinda related: some years ago NASA published all the Apollo missions pictures. I downloaded all of them (hundreds, maybe bit more), acting as a photo editor then I selected "good ones", cropped them to 16:10 format and made a background picture pack - I'm using it on all my devices since then. If someone is interested, they're published at [0] - feel free to use.
I did something similar with their lunar libration videos captures by the LRO [1], using the frames from the video with the Windows desktop background 'slideshow' functionality (desktop background changes once a minute).
It looks fake. Turns out what looks real is shaped by experience in Earth atmosphere at Earth scale with Earth gravity. Those 70s and 80s sci-fi movies with close ups of plaster models turn out to have gotten it right. Even things like the earth panning behind the completely motionless ship looks like a bad composite job, because nothing is ever that motionless except a static image.
This is an interesting tangent. Is it Flickr's copyright rules that make it attractive? Or, something else? Lack of existing competitors? Not associated with a social media account?
Because its continued existence has been in grave doubt for years?
I was a heavy Flickr user, but when Yahoo sold it to SmugMug in 2018, I basically assumed it was going to be either merged out of distinct existence or shuttered. I downloaded an archive of all my stuff and stopped using it altogether. Because what’s the point of using a platform that’s so obviously no longer viable…was my thinking at the time. I would never have guessed it would remain alive this long but it’s still not anything I would want to invest time in or rely on anymore.
Yeah I did a brief scan and a brief search for opinions on their practices when I saw the comment I initially replied to and didn’t find anything concerning. Doesn’t mean there isn’t anything, but it either wasn’t serious enough to be surfaced, or nobody more knowledgeable than me has looked.
How are the videos captured or processed? The solar lens flares are smoothly interpolated but the moon surface shows lower FPS, almost feels like the flares were on a separate layer.
My guess: they are the same update rate. The lens flares have blurrier edges and move less across the screen. This makes the jumps less obvious.
CGI animations also add blurring, and even your eyes have an integration time that will make fast moving objects blurry. So your brain good at interpolating blurry edges.
Why does the moon looks soft/smooth in the videos? Is it because the material is soft? Or a scale thing. If you consider mountains on Earth they look jagged.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/fireflyspace/albums/7217772031...
There's also a cool lunar flyover video taken during final deorbit.