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Neil Armstrong / NASA file
One of the most unusual and oft-used pictures showing Neil Armstrong on the moon is this one, which is actually a reflection of a lunar scene on Apollo 11 crewmate Buzz Aldrin's helmet visor. The reflection shows a fuzzy image of Armstrong holding the Hasselblad 70mm camera, with Aldrin's shadow stretching in front of him. Armstrong is flanked by the lunar module and scientific experiments. The cross is a "fiducial" mark used for calibration. For more about the picture, check out an analysis from the Apollo 11 Lunar Surface Journal.
The reasons for first moonwalker Neil Armstrong's reticence on Earth may be psychologically complex, but there's a simpler reason why pictures of him on the moon are so scarce: In addition to being the commander of the history-making Apollo 11 mission in 1969, he was the chief photographer for the mission's moonwalk.
Nearly all of the pictures that were taken during the first moon landing show Armstrong's sole crewmate on the moon, Buzz Aldrin, because Armstrong was stuck behind the camera.
But it'd be an overstatement to claim that there's only one picture showing the recently departed astronaut during his lunar walkabout. All you have to do is notice that different people have pointed to different pictures as the "only one."
Armstrong may have taken most of the scores of photographs that were captured on the lunar surface, but Aldrin also had a couple of turns behind the Hasselblad 70mm camera, and there were other cameras as well: the famous TV camera that transmitted that "one small step," and a 16mm movie camera that was looking out a window from the lunar module. "The Cameras of Apollo" website provides a rundown.
Take a look at these pictures showing Armstrong during the moonwalk, then take a spin through our slideshow featuring the highlights of Armstrong's life, before, during and after Apollo 11:
NASA / CollectSpace / Andrew Chaikin
Some frames of Neil Armstrong working on the moon were captured on a 16mm movie camera that was set up on the Apollo 11 lunar module to record the action. This high-definition scan of a movie frame provides the clearest view of Armstrong's face while he was on the lunar surface. That's because Armstrong had raised his gold-colored outer visor while he was working. Check out this CollectSpace tale about the picture.
Buzz Aldrin / NASA file
Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong works next to the lunar module with his back to the camera, in a picture that was taken by crewmate Buzz Aldrin as part of a panoramic series.
Buzz Aldrin / NASA file
This picture shows Apollo 11's solar wind experiment on the right, and the back of Neil Armstrong's backpack at the left edge of the frame.
See images from the career of astronaut and American hero Neil Armstrong.
More scenes of spaceflight:
- Audio slideshow: Voyage of the Millennium
- NBC video: Highlights of spaceflight
- Slideshow: NASA's highs and lows
- Timeline: Glory Days on the Final Frontier
- Space gallery on NBCNews.com
For much more about the photos from Neil Armstrong's spaceflights, check out this roundup from CollectSpace.
Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.
Leave a Comment:
It saddens me seeing all these Moon pictures because I will never be able to go to the Moon.
Um, ya I missed my chance too
I still hold out hope. With commercial sub-orbital trips coming soon, once money starts rolling in you really don't know where it will stop. I may not walk on the Moon, but a trip around the Moon in a commercial craft is plausible.
I have never seen these pictures before. How very cool, especially the high angle shot where we can see Armstrong's face. Thanks Alan.
Awesome screen capture of Neil Armstrong with his outer visor up. I will have to explore that Cameras website tonight.
Who said you wouldnt be able to go to the moon??
Why is Buzz's shadow so much longer in the first picture than Neil's? The curve of the visor would distort the image somewhat but................. Come on, someone had to start a controversy.
The lunar landing is one of my first childhood memories that stuck. RIP Mr. Armstrong.
lol, it distorts it hugely, the foot of the lem looks like it's half the diameter of the craft! :D
One that is not Buzz's shadow in the first pic. It is the LEM's
Two. The vizors have no effect of the pictures as the camera was outside the the helmet.
Controversy can be broken by using a large telesocpe.
Moon landings are one of my earliest memories as well.
One that is not Buzz's shaddow in the first pic. It is the LEM's
Two the visor has no effect on the photos the camera was outside the helmet
No Controversy. Moon landing can be proved by large telescope. Also mirrors placesd to measure distance.
Moon landings are one of my earliest memories as well.
RIP Astronaut Armstrong.
Viper, I think you are looking at a different picture. They are talking about the very first picture on the page, above the by-line, which is of Armstrong and the LEM reflected off of Aldrin's visor. The visor is causing severe distortions which do, in fact, make Aldrin's shadow appear much longer than Armstrong's, but it very clearly is just due to the shape of the visor. :)
I look at these pictures with envy and awe. I am jealous of them, as I will never get to go to the Moon, but I am so happy that they got to experience it. It makes me happy just to know that any person from this rock, flew and stood upon THAT rock!
Though I am saddened at the death of Neil Armstrong, I am glad that the moon is back in the news especially after all of the Mars coverage. I believe that though Mars has a lot of research potential, it is the Moon that has the higher potential for commercial and residential exploitation. If people are sent to Mars, it would be months before any type of assistance could arrive from Earth. Whereas the Moon is conveniently close. The light gravity and vacuum that is present on the Moon are just 2 reasons that we should be taking a serious look at the Moon's commercial potential. Unless some new element is found on Mars, the Moon is where we should be concentrating our efforts.
Indeed, though I look at it more as a medium term vs. long term thing. The sad thing is that we've wasted at least 30 years so far. We should've had a lunar colony at least by the late 80s or the very least before Clinton was out of office.
This is from a recent Ask Me Anything Post on Reddit.com from a gentlemen whose Grandfather worked for NASA during the Apollo Missions.
"
When they got to the moon, Armstrong was the first one on the moon, and Aldrin passed the camera down to Armstrong. When we got the pictures back at 4am, everybody wanted them for the newspaper and magazines. I had a whole photographic lab standing by to prepare the stuff for issuance. Problem was, I didn't know who was who because everybody looked the same in the space suits. But I figured Aldrin passed the camera to Armstrong, so the famous picture of the astronaut by the flag, I figured had to be aldrin. So that's who I said it was. When aldrin came back, he told me no, first thing Armstrong did was pass the camera back to me. So that is Armstrong by the flag, not Aldrin. We sent out corrections to everyone, of course, and some people printed the corrections, but most people and newspapers still think it's Aldrin. I suggested that after that they have some distinguishing marks, so since then the mission commander has a stripe on his sleeve. But I always feel like that was my contribution to screwing up history. "
So maybe there was more pictures of Neil than we thought?
Armstrong, one of America's greatest heroes who inspired generations of space explorers and astronomers. He was my inspiration to study astronomy and cosmology. I hope in the afterlife he is traversing the universe to seek all the things we may never get to see. I only hope humanity can get its collective head out of its ass to unify and reach for the stars as we should be doing.
The face of the Man in the Moon is Neil Armstrong smiling back at us!
Alan, can't get enough of these. Please keep'em coming.
Neal was hiding behind thecurtain on the sound stage. It's all made up folks. Wake up dummies!
Maybe that was why his family asked people to "wink at the moon". as you used to do to clue someone it was a joke. : )
If you ever had the chance to meet any of the three astronauts, would you call them out and say it was fake?
Shut up Scott.
Why collapse my comment? This is all about opinions folks.
Communist propoganda tool.
Because Scott, it was learned that faking a mission to the Moon is more expensive and more difficult than going to the Moon. So we went. You apparently can't figure that out.
No Scott, it is not an opinion, it is a declaration of fact. You are entitled to your own opinion of course, but not your own facts. The difference: Two examples: Fact: it's a movie about a jailbreak. Opinion: I wish I hadn't watched it. Fact: Neil and Buzz walked on the real moon in July 1969. Opinion: you find that impossible to believe.
Yes, it is. And in the opinion of enough folks the option "No Value" is THEIR opinion of your comment.
Scott, your comment was collapsed because it has been proven, many times over by many different sources, that the landing was not faked. It's not our fault if you can't believe that, but obviously enough people who DO understand think your tin foil hat theory can't hold water.
Harcourt Fenton Mudd, you're absolutely correct; these conspiracy folks need to take off their tin foil hats and crawl out from under their troll bridge to get some fresh air and vitamin D and go to the library.
Scientific proof such as lunar rock and dust samples, a plethora of photographic evidence from all 6 of the Apollo the missions that went to the moon, eyewitness testimony from all the astronauts who have been there let alone all the mission support personnel, the existence of multiple Saturn IB upper stages now in heliocentric orbit that have been tracked, and perhaps most (recently) convincing - the Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter photos of all the landing sites from the 6 Apollo missions that landed on the moon . How 'bout the fact that all of these Saturn V rockets were launched in front of crowds of thousands of spectators, and the only thing that came back home was the command module (capsule) minus the service module, the lunar module, and for the later Apollo missions, the rover - and that capsule splashed down and was recovered by numerous Navy personnel in recovery operations that numbered thousands of Navy personnel. This happened not once, but 6 times!!! Not only that, but radar tracking stations around the globe were constantly monitoring the flight trajectory and keeping in audio contact with the astronauts. So what were these guys doing for a week or more in outer space after riding in a little capsule on top of a thundering Saturn V filled with enough liquid rocket fuel to propel them far out of earth orbit -- twiddling their thumbs in low earth orbit? Why were these astronauts placed in quarantine for weeks and weeks after the first couple of missions - to waste their time and piss them off? Why was Apollo 13 such a dire emergency; I guess NASA faked that too? LOL
I find this conspiracy mentality not only laughable, but also extremely offensive. Yeah, everyone's entitled to his or her own opinion, but if that opinion is based completely on falsehoods in the face of rock-solid (both literally and figuratively) scientific proof, others certainly have the right to challenge that opinion. Harcourt states "the landing was not faked", and that is the truth. It truly insults our intelligence as a nation and as a spacefaring world, and is disrespectful to the astronauts and NASA personnel who worked so hard to get to this unforgiving environment and achieve this mind-blowing goal... particularly those astronauts who lost their lives in the years prior to the Apollo 11 launch.
Scott
I am curious (assuming that you are actually serious, which I doubt). On what basis would you conclude (with sufficient confidence to call others 'dummies') that the US faked its lunar landing?
Here is an absolute treasure of thousands of photos during the Apollo 11 mission from training to arriving home.
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/images11.html
Awesome, Mark. Some really amazing stuff there, and I've only begun to look at it. Thanks for posting that. I'm sure this won't make those conspiracy folks take off their tinfoil hats just yet, though.
Looking through the thousands of pictures of my wife and kids as they were growing up, you will find very few pictures of me. I empathize.
Not made of cheese.
Never been back.
First of all, I believe 100% that Armstrong, Aldrin and the others did travel to and return from the moon. But there is a funny story about my dear old Grandma. She never believed the missions were real. Her biggest piece of 'evidence' was a video shot from one of the Apollo missions that showed a crescent Earth shining up above the Lunar surface. She pointed to it and declared that if the astronauts were really 'up there' on the moon, then thy would have to 'look DOWN' to see the Earth. I thought about explaining that views of up and down are relative to your local gravity center, but only briefly. Did the wisest thing, which was to kiss her on the forehead and tell her I loved her anyway.
Since we left quite a bit of equipment behind on the moon, it should be easy to point the Hubble and take a few photographs of the equipment for these naysayers.
Hubble isn't big enough to see something that small, that far away. It's a basic limitation of physics - any telescope of Hubble's size would be too small to see the gear we left on the Moon.
Of course we HAVE seen the landing sites from lunar orbit.
Really? I just thought it was due to the limitation of the manufacturing techniques that we have now.
Learned something new today :)
Mitchell
I had to dash and didn't have time for the details of why Hubble can't see Apollo 11:
The Hubble isn't big enough to see the Apollo hardware. The Moon is 384,400 km away. At that distance, the smallest things Hubble can distinguish are about 90 meters wide - about the size of a football field / soccer pitch. The biggest piece of left-behind Apollo equipment is only 9 meters across and thus smaller than a single pixel in a Hubble image.
It's a basic limitation of the physics of visible light, which astronomy defines as "resolution" - the smallest amount of detail that may be discerned.
The key limitation in resolution is the size (diameter) of a telescope's main mirror, which in the case of Hubble is 2.4 meters; the bigger the mirror, the greater the resolution. (Also important is the "quality" of the optics; the successor to the title "the largest telescope in the world", the Soviet BTA-6, suffered from really horrible optics, and is considered a "white elephant" even tho it is much larger than the Hale Telescope at Palomar.)
Hubble's maximum theoretical resolution is 0.048 arc seconds (there are 60 arc minutes in a degree, and 60 arc seconds in an arc minute). Resolution is calculated by 116 divided by aperture in mm. = 116 divided by 2400 = 0.048 arc seconds.
From here on Earth, and also from the viewpoint of Hubble's low-Earth orbit, the diameter of the Moon is a bit more than .5 degrees, which is 31'40" (1900 arc seconds).
Therefore HST can resolve an object on the Moon of (1900 divided by 0.048 ) = 1/39,583 of the Moon's diameter
Actual diameter of Moon = 3476 km
Therefore resolvable object size = 3476 km divided by 39,583 = 87 meters
As the Apollo landers are only around 9 meters across it is not possible for the Hubble to resolve them; they are below the lowest possible resolution limit of that size mirror at this distance. At the distance of the Moon, the smallest object that Hubble could resolve would be 86 meters (about 280 feet) across; about one order of magnitude too big to see Apollo. Even then, the hardware would only be seen in a single pixel.
The current largest ground based visible light telescope is the 10 meter Keck, far bigger than the HST and therefore has a far better resolution of 0.012. But this is a theoretical limit that cannot be achieved through an atmosphere, so the HST, being in the vacuum of space, is still number one.
There are overwhelmingly large ground-based telescopes on the drawing board that will be large enough to see Apollo's landing sites directly, but they are many years from completion.
Hey Michael, bare with me a little :)
How does mirror size specifically determine resolution. I know it does, in so much that we are compensating for the limitations of the viewing device, be it eye, film, or CCD and the mirror cannot become perfectly smooth.
If the viewing apparatus has an infinite resolution, then there is no need for a mirror to begin with (or lens for that matter). A simple tube long enough to block out extraneous light to get the desired resolution of a particular object is all that is needed (assuming we can stitch multiple shots together). Given that we can't have that, has it been calculated what the maximum resolution of a CCD or film could be for any given area?
Or is this based on maximum resolution that a mirror polished to the point of being smooth down to the atom level can have? This question arises from the fact that any true hyperbolic surface will have an infinite resolution at the focal point, but a mirror will always have bumps the size of atoms.
Thanks for your time :)
Mitchell
Sure Mitchell!
The best theoretical resolution of a telescope depends on its diameter and on the wavelength of the light it focuses:
~ D = the diameter of the primary (in the Hubble and Hale and other reflecting scopes, that's the mirror; In the Yerkes and other refracting telescopes it is the lens in the front of the tube; for radio scopes like Arecibo or Goldstone it's the dish)
~ λ (lambda) = the wavelength of the band of light being observed, from radio through IR and visible light to x-ray and gamma. Radio waves, due to their very long wavelength, have far less resolution than visible light or x-rays, even with a monster dish like at Arecibo.
So, the maximum angular resolution of a telescope (R) - i.e. the smallest possible thing that it can see, as measured in radians, is:
R = λ / D
For our Apollo on the Moon as seen by Hubble question we then convert the radians to arc seconds (the standard unit of angular size in astronomy), plug in the well-known distance from Earth to Moon, and we find that Hubble's resolution is 1/10th of what is required to see a LEM. Even if Hubble was 10 times larger, and reached minimum angular resolution to see a LEM, the object will still be just one pixel in size on the camera; too small to see any detail at all. Get a telescope that is 100x larger than Hubble, and the LEM would resolve (at theoretical best) as an image 10 pixels across - now we finally have something large enough to really look at.
Now, all we need is a new space telescope that is 100x (or so) larger than Hubble!
Then add in the other problems that you outline - minute imperfections in a dish, "noise" such as cosmic rays impacting the camera (even here on the ground - I see a dozen or so cosmic ray impacts every observing night), slight temperature and voltage fluctuations introducing noise to the imager, and so on and so on, and we end up being hard-pressed to get within 50% of the max theoretical resolution of any particular scope.
*laughs* I think a simple "You forgot that photons have 'dimensions' " would have suffice :)
At least I think that's what you are getting at. *grins* Thanks for the answer.
Oddly enough I've never come across any explanation the specifically says that it's due to photons having them, whenever I tried to solve the problem I've always treated them as rays. This always led me to the conclusion that it's tied to having so many atoms to work with in the collector and that the lens will always be sort of bumpy since you can't grind it less than an atom of smoothness. If that were the case, then the theoretical limits I've heard were vastly underestimated. But I can see where treating them as a ray doesn't work now. :)
Mitchell
Wayne-2463791,
You're going to love this, this following NASA website is incredible. This site is probably better than any Hubble imaging of the moon could get. This is from the Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter and shows all the different landing sites from the 6 Apollo missions that landed on the moon, and shows much, if not all, of the hardware still remaining on the surface. Just in case MSN takes off the HTML link below, just google "NASA - Apollo Landing Sites Revisited". I doubt this will quell any of the conspiracy theorist nay-sayers, but hope you'll enjoy this website.
Well, I see they did remove my html link, but it is: www dot nasa dot gov slash mission_pages slash apollo slash revisited slash
Hiya Buzz!
New members are under probation, and can't post links, for some length of time. It's an attempt to minimize spam posts, but it's awkward for the new folks.
I see that you figured out the workaround - spaces and dot and stuff; thanks for the link!
~Michael
Hi Michael,
Thanks for letting me know! Those are some amazing posts you have there!
@Mitchell: If you're interested, you can see the Apollo landing sites via these links, which contain images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter that Michael mentioned.
http://featured-sites.lroc.asu.edu/
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/main/index.html
Here is a tragic truth,,,,,,,,,,,,
Hippies and socialist scumbags like Obama and his minions grew up with wonderful examples of courage and American exceptionalism like NASA and Armstrong.
Kids today will grow up with a lying loser for a president, nothing flying from NASA and the media worshipping itself.
It is a very sad truth that political wing nuts like yourself turn pleasant discussions into political garbage fests.
To paraphrase a scene from Star Wars: We don't serve your kind here. Take your political bumper-sticker garbage elsewhere, there are no takers here.