40th Anniversary Moon Landing Memories
With July 20 being the 40th anniversary of the landing of Apollo 11 on the moon, I'm curious about whether anyone has memories of how you tried to record the original moment.
I am a little too young to remember the original moon landing, but I do remember (after the fact) how my parents recorded the moment. My father shot a Polaroid instant print image of the grainy picture on the TV and then pinned it to a bulletin board in his workshop, where it hung for my entire childhood, growing slightly more yellow every year. The photo print quality was awful, and the glare from the flash on the Polaroid camera blocked part of the TV screen ... in fact, if you didn't know about the photo's subject, you probably wouldn't have guessed it was of the original moon landing. However, it provided an interesting memory of a historical moment.
Anyone else have stories about how they or their parents tried to record the moment? Obviously, with this being the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, consumer electronics devices that we take for granted for recording such occurrences didn't exist 40 years ago. You couldn't DVR the moon landing, and the earliest VCRs were rarely found in homes in the late 1960s. So how did you attempt to record the moment? Did you use a film camera?
NASA has a variety of events centering on the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, for those seeking more information.
I was 11 years old at the time. My mother took photos from the TV screen with a Kodak Pony 828 camera. The photos didn’t come out great, but they are still a treasured memento of that unbelievable achievement.
Randy Pausch in “The Last Lecture” talks about how he was away at camp and missed the moon landing but his father took a Polaroid picture of it that he treasured.
I was five years old and in a Brooklyn hospital. I’d had surgery the day before the landing, but I remember my parents talking constantly about this incredible & amazing achievement. They kept any newspaper with articles about the moon landing.
I was actually giving birth to my daughter at that time. The nurses let me watch reruns of it later that night. It will always be a big memory for our family.
I just watched it on TV;and saw it in the papers.
To record film images off of TV would require
at least ASA/ISO 800 film…or a “push” to
that speed.
My wife and I we living in Wilkinsbur, PA, while I attended grad school at the University of Pittsburgh. We shot Polaroid pictures of the landing and vividly remember Walter Cronkite’s commentary during the landing. A remarkable evening.
I shot several shots of my Brother sitting up close to the 21 inch round tube tv and bounced the light and then used a 15th of a second on tri x in a Nikon F.
I was in the 8th grade and glued to the tv watching those grainy pictures. I recorded what was said on my little reel to reel tape recorder. After all these years and being in the attic, moved from place to place and covered with dust I doubt they would play even if I still had the tape recorder. But it was a fantastic time.
I was in my early 20’s. My two best friends, and my Parents and I watched the landing on three different tvs tuned to 3 different channels. I snapped several halfway decent photos with a Polaroid. I still have them. We were able to watch the tvs and look out a big window at the full moon at the same time. It was spine tingling to see humans walking on the moon while looking at it out the window. I shall never forget it. Thad
My wife and I were married with me attending college. We took our Super 8MM movie camera and filmed the men walking on the moon from our TV set. Pretty crude but it worked. Just a little bit of rolling picture from film speed differnces.
Gary