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Comment by rcthompson | Hacker News Reader

It's kind of weird seeing crystal clear HD pictures of space objects. I think we just associate blurry black & white images with space, since most of the probes that we have currently exploring other planets and moons were launched before it was practical to include full-color HD cameras (and/or the requisite data transmission capacity) on space probes. (Similar to how people subjectively prefer 24 FPS for feature films.)

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I'm not sure I agree... This [1] is from Apollo 17, and I don't think the quality is any worse than these new ones.

[1] http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a17/AS17-134-...

Hasselblads cameras was used in the Apollo missions. [1]

Twelve hasselblad cameras were left behind on the moons surface.

It was not that many years ago, around y2k or shortly thereafter if I remember correctly, that hasselblad finally decided that digital photography could match the picture quality their cameras achieved using traditional/analog film and started to manufacture digital options for their cameras.

When I look at the pictures from the moon I start to understand why they held a stiff upper lip for so many years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasselblad#Hasselblad_cameras_...

As a photographer, I sometimes think my complete switch to digital might have been a mistake. I can't call myself a professional photohrapher because I make very little money off my pictures.

That said, I wish I didn't get rid of my old cameras, and 2.8 lenses. I wish I still had my BW darkroom still set up in my closet.

My pictures are all color now. They are technically fine, but my older pictures just look more interesting.

I'm a complete amateur at photography, but can you give me some details in the difference in outcomes between your BW setup and just passing your color pictures through a BW filter?

Convert them to black and white and they will look just as interesting:D

IIRC there were some internal setbacks in the process towards digital Hasselblads when they changed owners a few times in the late 90's and early 00's. So it wasn't all stiff-upper-lip.

And when they did go digital, it was slightly ridiculous. I mean, the cheapest option of the H3DII which launched in 2007 had 50% more megapixels than the most expensive Canon or Nikon camera you could buy that year. With almost twice the sensor area of a full-format DSLR the pixel count wasn't for show either. One of those low-end H3DII bodies (without a lens) in OK condition goes for more than $2000 today.

This is true, but keep in mind that higher-resolution, bigger digital backs (in comparison with fully integrated dslr cameras) were already on the market. Even so, Hasselblad lead that market for a time, then lost ground due to flagging innovation, bad decisions, etc.

Y2K was approximately when the consumer digital camera went on market.

It was earlier than that. I remember a relative owning an Apple QuickTake in the mid 90s and Wikipedia reckons they went on sale in ’94: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_QuickTake . I personally had a Samsung digital camera in 1998; it took a max of 128Mb SmartMedia cards.

I sold cameras from 90-91 and we were selling the first DSLR during that period. Unfortunately, I don't remember the details, just that we referred to it as "The Brick" because it weighed 2-3 times as much as the next comparable SLR, cost even more, and the pictures weren't nearly as good.

Note that there isn't something especially mystic or technologically important about old Hasselblad cameras.

It's just that they are medium format cameras, and used larger size film, which gives more resolution.

But that's not unique to Hasselblad -- lots of companies had (and some still have) medium format analog cameras at the time.

the fact that the government (NASA) used them, only proves they were settling to sell their equipment for less (it's usually more in invoice, but less when you account what you lost on red tape)

Actually government contracts can be very easy to overcharge.

I suppose in that case, they had the bandwidth to send the high-def pictures back to Earth, because they didn't need to transmit a digital picture via radio transmission, they simply brought the film back from the moon with them.

Never underestimate the bandwith of a lunar module full of film?

That photo looks fantastic! It makes me sad we haven't sent people back to the moon in almost half a century.

FWIW, a lot of the video from the first Apollo mission was low quality because they had to convert it from SSTV to NTSC by pointing a video camera at a monitor playing the live transmission.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_missing_tapes]

Just like Kinescope!

Or cam rip.

I think a lot of the unreal quality of lunar photos is the lack of atmosphere removing many of the cues our visual system uses to perceive a scene, particularly depth perception. The clarity of these new, HD pictures only exacerbates that.

Is it ever practical to include full-colour cameras? If science and resolution is the priority, isn't it better to send scientific cameras with movable filters? In other words, are these pictures from a colour camera or are they, like most probe images, composites from multiple bw/g scientific images?

You're not gaining much from a Bayer filter over three separate exposures, so you're probably right. Ordinary full-color pictures have to be demosaiced anyway, and it's more complex than laying three colored exposures on top of each other.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_filter

With three exposures you get to use the full resolution of the camera for each channel, so you end up a more detailed image and fewer artifacts... unless something moves, in which case you'll get strange colored ghosts.

People hear that space images are composites, and therefore somehow conclude that they're "not real."- but all consumer digital color photography are digital composites thanks to Bayer (and Bayer-style) filters, white balance adjustment, sharpening and denoise that are all baked into your JPEGs before you see them.

It's hard to say what "real" is when it comes to space. The differences in contrast and brightness are so dramatic that the composites aren't anywhere near what you'd see if you were standing there looking out a window. Take the recent images from Pluto. A "real" version taken with a standard GoPro would be too dark to be worth looking at. Likewise, any image of the sun and all it's dramatic weather aren't anything like the blinding light of the "real" sun.

I'm waiting for someone to compare these composite images, with their possibly different colors, to the Apollo film images. How can they both be of the same place if the sand is a different color? Get ready for some new conspiracy theories.

The point you bring up is not confined to space imagery, the same considerations apply to earth-bound photography, for that matter, as true in the ancient days of film as today.

Back then every photographer knew that various color films of the same type would render scenes differently. Every manufacturing process produces biases in results, the color-forming dyes at the core of color films responded in subtly distinguishable ways reflecting their explicitly unique chemical compositions.

In the current digital era, vendors produce "image processing engines" that correspond to film chemistry and just as variable. Camera-makers advertise particular "color signatures" to help promote sales and brand loyalty.

Relevantly, witness the endless discussion in photo "gear forums" over which rendition is the most "correct". Arguably we could say "all of the above", a case could be made one is as accurate as another since there is no single standard measurement of "accuracy".

Bottom line is I wouldn't expect any given Hasselblad to produce two photos with the same color rendering when they're shot on different brands of film. Comparing the Apollo moon landscape with the Chinese digital images will inevitably show differences, but we couldn't really say which is closer to how it "really" looks.

> we couldn't really say which is closer to how it "really" looks.

We couldn’t, but we could just ask the Apollo Astronauts.

Definitely - it reminds me of the strange feeling seeing coloured "olden days" photos, things don't seem nearly as distant. https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/gorskii.html

Yes, very unreal! It would be absolutely great if they release quality video or VR material!

There was better video once. The original public pictures came from pointing a broadcast TV camera at a slow-scan monitor, which is why they're so crappy. Better data was recorded at the tracking stations, directly from the downlink. Those tapes were archived. Efforts were made recently to find them. It now appears that when NASA had a shortage of 1" tape in the 1980s, the tapes were reused for Landsat imagery.[1]

[1] https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/Apollo_11_TV_Tapes_Report.p...

You're forgetting about the other Apollo landing missions. The later ones have fantastic color video footage, remastered in full HD for episode 4 of the fantastic documentary series When We Left Earth.

The whole 6 part documentary series are worth watching for anyone remotely interested in space, but here's a small sample of the quality of the moon landing video footage: https://kristofferR.com/files/moonlanding_footage_HD.mkv

The wonderful movie For All Mankind [0], from 1989, features high quality footage of the Apollo moon landings and a beautiful score by Brian Eno.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_All_Mankind

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