Peculiar perspectives on the moon. On the right, a slice […]

Peculiar perspectives on the moon.

On the right, a slice of the moon, larger than anything brought back by Apollo (it really looks like that up close). On the left, the “dark side” of the moon, seen for the first time in high resolution from recovered Lunar Orbiter tape storage by Dennis Wingo.

Before Apollo, the U.S. flew robotic satellites around the moon taking analog photos in strips. The film had to be developed onboard the satellite in the onboard dark room (since the satellite would not return to Earth). The film was then raster scanned with a 5 micron beam and transmitted back to Earth. A lot of work before digital cameras!

This image is an aggregate of many strips, each an orbital pass around the far side of the moon. But none of the original photos were released to the public. In every NASA press release, they showed a degraded photo of a photo. It was the Cold War period, and the U.S. did not want the Soviets to know how good our spy sat camera resolution really was.

We never see the far side of the Moon from Earth (given the tidal lock of our moon, the slightly heaviest side always faces Earth). So this image, degraded from this original, seen in the U.S. in the 60’s for the first time, was a detailed unveiling of the space frontier, of the unknown.

And we found a ginormous impact crater (right side), which stands out as the dominant, and hidden, feature of our moon. Well, it occurred to me that a young George Lucas must have seen that image, inspiring the Death Star of his imagination. “That’s no moon!”