[X] My Assistant

[dvandorn]

I know that by the time the Voyager Jupiter encounters began, images coming in "hot off the wire," so to speak, were displayed (on TV, anyway) with histograms alongside the images.

Was this when the practice of showing histograms along with the images began? If not, when did the practice start? I don't recall seeing them on Mariner 6/7 images, or on Mariner 9 images. Were there histograms on the initial public release images from Mariner 10, or either Pioneer 10 or 11? (I have my doubts about the Pioneers, as they had a scanning photomultiplier tube in lieu of a real camera.)

And note that you don't see it much anymore -- when did the practice stop? Or was it really mostly done just during the Voyager encounters?

Anyone remember?

-the other Doug

[dvandorn]

Oh, yes, there were live TV displays of incoming images prior to the Voyagers. The first that I can recall in detail was from Ranger IX. As it plunged into the Moon, the output from one of the cameras was fed directly to a TV feed, real time. For the first time in history, the title "Live from the Moon" was displayed on my TV screen.

I also recall that the first image from Surveyor 1 was broadcast live as it was received at JPL. It was a low-res (200-line) image of the footpad and the soil disturbed by the footpad. It was the first image of a footpad settled down on the surface of another Solar System body. I remember it well.

The Mariner 6 and 7 far-encounter sequences were shown real-time, at least on CBS. (Walter Cronkite, after just finishing up his network's coverage of Apollo 11 less than a month before, was not going to let live TV pictures of Mars go without live coverage.) I don't recall the close-encounter sequences being covered live, but for all of me they might have been.

The first Viking 1 lander image was also displayed real-time, as it built up line by line. So was the second image. And, of course, the images from Pioneers 10 and 11 from Jupiter and Saturn were presented real-time. They were very poor, since they had yet be corrected for spacecraft motion during the image build-up process, but even so, they were shown real-time.

I just don't recall any of them, except for the Voyager images, having the histograms displayed on the live feeds.

-the other Doug