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Unseen Moon Landing Video Released

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the nice-soundstage dept.

bazzalunatic writes "Digitally remastered footage of the moon landing, including high-quality and brighter images of Neil Armstrong stepping off the ladder will be shown for the first time ever to the general public at an awards ceremony in Sydney, Australia. The magnetic data tapes seem to have all been lost — erased — by NASA, so all that's left are VHS recordings, which have been restored, giving the best-ever film of the whole moon landing. The publicity over this seems to be pushing NASA into releasing the whole 3-hour recording."

7 of 212 comments (clear)

  1. VHS recordings? by mcgrew · · Score: 5, Informative

    There was no Video Home System when the moon landings happened. There was reel to reel tape, and cinescope, but no VHS until 1976.

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    1. Re:VHS recordings? by tverbeek · · Score: 4, Informative

      RTFA: It's a 1980s dupe onto VHS of the original reel-to-reel.

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    2. Re:VHS recordings? by commodore64_love · · Score: 4, Informative

      There was no VHS at the time of the airing of the First, Second, or Third Doctors either.

      Nevertheless some of the lost episodes were recovered from VHS or Betamax because that's all we have left. Perhaps some engineer copied the original 1969 tapes over to a VHS collection. Then the originals were erased by an idiot, so all that's left are the backups.

      Aside - VHS is a really crummy format for storage. Only ~320 pixels across by 486 scanlines. The original magnetic tapes from 1969 probably offered the full resolution possible with NTSC-I, or about ~640x480. Super VHS can capture that full resolution, but not regular VHS.

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    3. Re:VHS recordings? by hcdejong · · Score: 5, Informative

      The footage we're talking about was originally taken with a slowcan camera, 250 TV lines at 10 fps. That's not "a high definition camera".

  2. Isn't that summary wrong? by Fallen+Kell · · Score: 3, Informative

    They are saying that only a VHS tape of the landing is left, and that all the original tapes were erased/lost/destroyed. But this new tape is FROM one of those original tapes, albeit from the Sydney archives who relayed the data since they were part of the line-of-sight network to communicate with the astronauts.

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  3. Re:NASA....in Australia!? by icegreentea · · Score: 3, Informative

    The source tapes were from Australia. The highest quality video from the moon landing were in Australia. Since they decided to land on the moon early, the US was under the horizon, so they transmitted to Australia instead.

  4. Fixed that for you by albertid · · Score: 4, Informative

    Digitally rerendered footage of the moon landing, ...