1969 moon landing remastered video shown for first time
By IANSThursday, October 7, 2010
LONDON - After six years of searching and digital restoration, scientists have finally completed remastering footage of the Apollo 11 moon landing.
The restored video was shown for the first time Wednesday at an Australian Geographic magazine awards ceremony, with Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin as guest of honour.
In 2009, the NASA released some extracts of the work to mark the 40th anniversary of the landing, but it has taken the Apollo 11 tape search team six years to complete full digital restoration of the two-and-a-half hour-long tape.
It shows the first few minutes of Neil Armstrong’s history-making mission far more clearly than the world saw on TV at the time, reports the Telegraph.
Scientist John Sarkissian, an astronomer from the Parkes Observatory in New South Wales, Australia, said the California station that received the original telecast from the moon did not have the right settings, resulting in a blurry, barely visible Armstrong.
Leading a research team, Sarkissian has tracked down other surviving original recordings to recreate an enhanced version from the best tapes of the first broadcast.
“During the course of our search for those tapes, we discovered lots of really good recordings of the broadcast which people actually saw in their homes and we have taken the best of those recordings and compiled them into a single two-and-a-half hour video,” Sarkissian said.
They found one copy at NASA’s Sydney switching center, a 16mm kinescope copy in the US National Archives, a well preserved two inch tape at CBS archives and a Super 8mm home movie taken by a scientist at the Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station near Canberra.
“We believe that what we have now is a superior quality. We don’t want to give the impression that its HD quality TV or even broadcast quality but it is better than what was previously available,” he said.
Sarkissian said that the NASA would be looking for ways to make this digitally mastered full edition of the 1969’s video available for the public soon.
