Celebrating the 1st Moon walk - exactly 50 years on....

[geoflewis]

Well I've just wrapped up an all night session (actually still need to close the obs) and its fully dawn here, remembering the first moonwalk by Neil Armstrong and Buz Aldrin which I watched live as a 14 year old lad. I fought cloud all night, so captured some video data early on, then for once had good luck as the clouds rolled back right at exactly 50 years after that 'one small step.....' The seeing was not great, but the timing of the capture was what I was really after.

Here's the resulting annotated image being the best 500 of 5000 frames captured with an IR filter through my C14 using my ASI 120MM-s camera . The video was processed in AS3, Registax and PS/CS2.

Thanks for looking,

Cheers, Geof

Edited July 21, 2019 by geoflewis

[MarsG76]

Great work... 

[Stu]

Excellent stuff Geof, glad you got lucky!

[maw lod qan]

Our moon rise here in Fla came a little after the actual time. Along with it came clouds left behind by some strong thunderstorms.

I took a quick look at Saturn then Jupiter, before going back in to wait some more.

At 2:30 the sky did clear so I got to view the area and think.

Thanks for the image. Good seeing the craters named for them. I could see Armstrong good, then as Aldrin move through the sweet spot, it would appear. Collins remained hidden.

 

[jock1958]

Great image Geof. I was 11 during the landing and vividly remember the grainy images on the TV - loved every minute of it!

[Davey-T]

Well done Geof, got a bit of clear here at just the right moment, haven't looked at the vid' yet, closed the obs'y at 4.30 as the sun was coming up and went to bed for 4 hours.

Dave

[Littleguy80]

Excellent Geof. I went out around 23:30 but lots of cloud around and the seeing was really poor. You did really well to get that image. A great way to mark the anniversary. 

[geoflewis]

5 hours ago, MarsG76 said:

Great work... 

Thanks. Geof

3 hours ago, Stu said:

Excellent stuff Geof, glad you got lucky!

Thanks Stu, I was listening to the rerun of the 'live' feed between Mission Control, Columbia and the LM, which was great fun. I had hoped to start a capture run just as Armstrong uttered those imortal words, but with so much cloud around I made sure to get some, albeit poor quality, videos in the can much earlier. In fact I was working through those for about 1 hour before the time of the Moon Walk (ok 50 years later) as I was totally clouded out. If I hadn't had the 'live' feed to keep me company I'd have given up and gone to bed. Imaging my surprise when about 5 minutes before D-time, the Moon started to poke through the clouds, so I was scrabbling around trying to reframe the camera and check focus. I heard Armstrong utter the words, 'Ok Houston, I'm on the porch', then silence. It took me a couple of minutes to realise that I'd lost my wifi connection, so I never got the 'one small step....' trigger to hit record, so I just started recording anyway, probable a few minutes late. It was to lose that playback feed, but I got the video that I wanted. Geof

1 hour ago, maw lod qan said:

Thanks for the image. Good seeing the craters named for them. I could see Armstrong good, then as Aldrin move through the sweet spot, it would appear. Collins remained hidden.

Thanks and glad that you got some visual. Geof

41 minutes ago, jock1958 said:

Great image Geof. I was 11 during the landing and vividly remember the grainy images on the TV - loved every minute of it!

Thanks Jock, yes, I too remember it very well. I still have the various press cuttings and Moon landing special inserts from various newspapers somewhere, though I couldn't find them yesterday when i was looking for them. Probably still packed and in the loft from when we moved house 3 years ago....!! Geof

 

38 minutes ago, Davey-T said:

Well done Geof, got a bit of clear here at just the right moment, haven't looked at the vid' yet, closed the obs'y at 4.30 as the sun was coming up and went to bed for 4 hours.

Dave

Thanks Dave, it was full sun up by the time I eventually closed down and went to bed about 5:15 - I got up again around 10ish. I look forward to seeing your process video pic. Geof

6 minutes ago, Littleguy80 said:

Excellent Geof. I went out around 23:30 but lots of cloud around and the seeing was really poor. You did really well to get that image. A great way to mark the anniversary. 

Thanks Neil, yes, I was pretty stoked when the clouds cleared right on time; that doesn't happen very often in my experience - perhaps once in 50 years.....!! Geof