First Full Earth Globe Photograph ? Options

[Bob Shaw]

And as Larry posted:

Bob Shaw

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[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

You know, that DODGE photo is a bit better than I remembered it being. (The lousy quality was largely due to the fact that DODGE was gravity-gradient stabilized and tended to wobble somewhat while its camera was taking three exposures through different filters to combine into a color view. Its entire purpose was to test gravity-gradient stabilization techniques, and its cameras were just to check its attitude alignment, explaining their low resolution.)

I've been seriously mixed up on my dates though -- I thought I remembered the DODGE photos being taken in summer 1966 instead of 1967, which would have put them before ATS-1's very sharp black-and-white ones from its geostationary post over the Pacific. (DODGE and ATS-3 were both hung over the Atlantic.)

[edstrick]

My somewhat vague understanding is that the ATS 3 color capability was an experiment to evaluate the usefullness of color data in geostationary weather images. Apparently not much, as I don't think ANY geostationary platform has done natural-color (RGB) band images. Adding Near, middle, and thermal IR bands for vegetation chlorophyll observation, ice/water cloud discrimination, water vapor mapping, and cloud height estmiates from temperature turned out to be much more useful.

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong on the lack of any natural color from Geostationary since ATS-3.

[ljk4-1]

In this online NASA book:

Dreams, Hopes, and Realities: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, the First Forty Years (NASA SP-4312, 1999) by Lane E. Wallace.

In Chapter 5, they have a *color* image of this photo of Earth taken by an
Aerobee sounding rocket in 1954:

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4312/p132.jpg

A black and white version of it is shown in the famous 1968 NASA book
Exploring Space with a Camera here:

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-168/p5.htm

[Guest_DonPMitchell_*]

In this online NASA book:

Dreams, Hopes, and Realities: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, the First Forty Years (NASA SP-4312, 1999) by Lane E. Wallace.

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4312/p132.jpg

I've seen that picture with the claim it was the first real space picture of the Earth.

One of the first Molniya satellites had a television camera on it, the same Seliger system used inside the Vostok cockpit. Probably a 400-line video image, but the picture seen in the PDF document is probably degraded badly by Xeroxing and PDF conversion. Molniya was a television and communications relay satellite, the camera was just an experiment. Here is a typcial Seliger image, still degraded by generation loss, but not as totally as the Molniya image:

[attachment=6138:attachment]

The Meteor-1 satellites had a television camera, and the later Meteor satelites had a mechanical scanning camera (like on Landsat and a lot of other Earth resource satellites).

When was the first linear camera used from space, using the motion of a satellite to sweep out an image? Landsat and Meteor uses reciprocating mirrors or spinning prisms to scan the Earth with a photomultiplier. I first example I know of is the Luna-19 camera. But surely someone photographed the Earth like this before the Moon though!

[Bob Shaw]

In this online NASA book:

Dreams, Hopes, and Realities: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, the First Forty Years (NASA SP-4312, 1999) by Lane E. Wallace.

In Chapter 5, they have a *color* image of this photo of Earth taken by an
Aerobee sounding rocket in 1954:

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4312/p132.jpg

A black and white version of it is shown in the famous 1968 NASA book
Exploring Space with a Camera here:

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-168/p5.htm

Interesting - that image was stitched together by hand from 16mm movie frames, IIRC. I was unaware that it was colour film which was used - it's the B&W version which has made it into the history books (I suppose colour press reproduction just wasn't especially economic 50 years ago). AutoStitch would just eat that sequence of images up - if anyone could find the original film...

Bob Shaw