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Now You Can Buy NASA's Own Original Apollo 11 Moon Landing Footage:
Got a player for 2-inch Quadruplex videotapes sitting around? You could view original NASA recordings of the Apollo 11 moon landing in your living room.
Sotheby's is auctioning off three first-generation tapes of the historic touchdown as part of its July 20 auction of space exploration artifacts set to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing.
The tapes run a total of 2 hours and 24 minutes and capture moments including Neil Armstrong declaring, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Also on the tapes are the "long-distance phone call" with President Richard Nixon and the planting of the American flag on the lunar surface.
[...] Gary George, an engineering student and NASA intern, purchased the tapes for $217.77 at a government surplus auction in 1976. It's estimated they'll sell for at least a $1 million at the Sotheby's event.
I was under the impression that the original tapes had been lost or recorded over. Does anyone else remember hearing that? Either way, this is a irreplaceable national treasure and I am astonished at seeing these up for auction. I am hopeful some philanthropist steps up, buys them, perhaps makes a personal copy, and then donates them to the Library of Congress.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JNCF on Tuesday July 16 2019, @07:04AM (8 children)
What is the highest resolution extractable from analog film, exactly? How many labs have the equipment to extract data at that resolution, and how quickly can they do it?
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @07:17AM (1 child)
*Cries in 128kbps MP3*
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @08:10AM
*Screeches in 64 Kbps Opus*
(Score: 4, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Tuesday July 16 2019, @07:43AM (3 children)
It is not analogue film, but analogue tape recording. The maximal resolution is whatever the technology of that time managed to write. I would be shocked if we didn't have the technology to read that at a much higher resolution than originally recorded.
Maybe not as a ready-made machine, but I'm sure there's a lab that could do it. And I would surely hope NASA has doen that before putting the tapes on auction.
But having said that, I do think there's value in preserving the original. Unlike any digitalization, the original tapes are hard to tamper with without it being detectable, and moreover their physical age can probably be at least approximately verified. That is, the tapes themselves are evidence that the event really happened, with a credibility that no digital copy can ever gain.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Tuesday July 16 2019, @07:51AM
Fair enough for this specific case, but krishnoid was explicitly making a point about old recordings in general.
Seeing as they didn't know where the tapes were, and clearer tapes were probably written over (see Time quote in another comment here), I would hope the same but expect otherwise.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by krishnoid on Tuesday July 16 2019, @08:17AM (1 child)
Or, for that matter, a digital original. If digital recording technology was available back then, and as it becomes the predominant method of recording, it seems like physical evidence would have had/has less credibility as time goes on.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday July 16 2019, @12:24PM
I am not sure it's really impossible to fake an analog recording. You can get the old equipment and tapes, feed it a high res fake, fake the passing of time with proper demagnetization/xtalk/noise.
back to topic, now they can show me whatever, too late. All I remember seeing of the moon mission before CGI fx got gud is material that looks fake. All I hear from the debunkers is stupid fluff. There is a mirror on the moon? So fucking what, russians put stuff too, there. But no living persons appeared in a genuine moon shot till now, for some reason. Frankly, IDC.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday July 16 2019, @08:36AM
The tape recording's resolution is almost certainly just grotty old NTSC straight off an Ampex, nothing more.
Information content? Mix the pixel clock with Shannon's Law if you desperately want a number, but it will be a mostly meaningless overestimate. You could try to work out what the end to end (camera, transmission, recording, and storage losses) noise ratio is, and plug that into Shannon's Law instead, and that would give you a more meaningful number. Which would tell you only one thing - the digital version of it contains all the useful information on the tape already.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday July 16 2019, @03:33PM
The highest resolution on analog film is limited by the graininess of the film.