Moon Shadows Frustrate Astronauts

saskboy writes "Apollo Chronicles by NASA talk about moon shadows and how they are much darker than daytime shadows on Earth. This is because there is almost no light reflected from atmosphere molecules or secondary light sources like "earthshine". "It is very easy to see in the shadows after you adapt for a while," noted Armstrong. But, added Aldrin, "continually moving back and forth from sunlight to shadow should be avoided because it's going to cost you some time in perception ability." Working on the moon even in the daylight might present unique problems not typically encountered on earth, if visual coordination in a shadow riddled area is required for a task. Audio of the NASA article is also available."

Comments

Re:Welding masks

[drinkypoo]

Welders lie to you. Or at least, they don't tell you the whole story. Now, presumably we're all talking about arc welding here. If you're doing gas welding then you probably have goggles with about shade 5 lenses. If you're doing arc, that's 9 or 10. For doing arc, you can get a hood with some sort of power source, and some sort of light sensor. They start out at a shade 5 and go up to shade 10 (or whatever is necessary) automatically when you weld. Thus, you get the best of both worlds - you can see what you're doing, AND you have protection. A lot of them are actually solar, and you keep them charged by just keeping them someplace exposed to light. They can also use the solar panel to detect the amount of light. The shade is achieved through the use of an LCD with a filter polarized to normally pass light.

There are also IR-vision goggles with light blocking; they have some kind of LCD matrix over the lens, and they detect bright lights and block them out so they don't overload the image sensor.