Video from Artemis II flyby of the Moon will not initially look spectacular
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I'm guessing they're using VR lenses, so they'd have at least some reduction. Just not as much as the Z-series provides by the look of it.
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I am watching the feed and there are some things that make zero sense. Why do we even need a live video of the moon? A high resolution photo that gets update every 5-10 minutes would be much better. Also they keep talking about the crew using handheld Nikon cameras to take photos through the winding. Great but why are their not very high resolution stabilized (if needed) cameras on the outside? High power zoom would also be great. It seems to me that NASA too the notion of "Do what Apollo 8 did" a bit to literally.
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Heh. They're doing a scheduled swap, trading out which astronauts get to be at the windows.
"Mission Control! Mission Control! It's my turn to be at the window! Make him move! Missionnn Connntrooolll! IT'S MY TURRRNNN!!!"
"Integrity, this is Mission Control. Don't make me turn the space capsule around!"
"Mission Control! Mission Control! It's my turn to be at the window! Make him move! Missionnn Connntrooolll! IT'S MY TURRRNNN!!!"
"Integrity, this is Mission Control. Don't make me turn the space capsule around!"
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I believe the exterior live video camera is mainly to help monitor the status of the spacecraft, and help troubleshoot if necessary. It's not for publicity or science.
The imaging with Nikon cameras is just opportunistic. There are dedicated science satellites orbiting the Moon with much better cameras, like Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and Chandrayaan-2. Orion is a crew transport vehicle, not a science satellite.
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It was selected because it is an older technology that is already known to withstand the higher radiation environment of space. The Z9 was a late addition to test as it was scheduled for the Artemis III mission.
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Just keep in mind the Moon doesn't rise till pretty late tonight, close to midnight depending on where you are.
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They always intended to time the far side orbit with the sun at an angle to create a shadowed landscape.
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Ars Legatus Legionis
Yeah the LRO is a 13 cm telescope lens for digital camera in an orbit that brings it to a 20km periapsis. It has resolving capabilities over two orders of magnitude greater than anything Orion has.
To answer prior posters question of why Orion doesn't have multiple high resolution stabilized gimbal mounted cameras with extremely large optics the answer is that isn't the mission of Artemis II.
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I was being dumb and not thinking it through so I thought "The moon is always rising somewhere" but now that I think about it, yeah, it's pretty late at night when it does everywhere right at the moment. Just ignore me, which is always good advice anyway.
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"Integrity, Mission Control, update to last. We are advised by Navigation that the space capsule will turn itself around shortly, no matter what. And play nice with the window access."
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Sadly (and bizarrely) there's a lot of annoyed people here today. SLS is a success and sent a crew safely to the Moon. The years of SLS hating on here by many didn't matter in the end, like a fart in the wind. Meanwhile Starship that many of the SLS haters love remains unrated and an empty metal can.
It turns out that it costs a lot of money to safely send a crew of 4 to the Moon and back. Shocker!
It turns out that it costs a lot of money to safely send a crew of 4 to the Moon and back. Shocker!
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Well, there's another factor - part of the reason EMF spectrum is divided into "bands" isn't just arbitrary - it's based on the physical propagation properties of those frequencies. Shortwave behaves very differently than VHF which behaves very differently from microwave which behaves very differently from IR or visible.
You can't really easily use frequencies in different bands the same way as a single channel, because they will behave differently. mmWave will travel a short distance through air and then gets blocked. If you tried to use mmWave together with something below mmWave, you are likely to have part of your signal reach a destination receiver but not all of it. But within a band, you can choose channel sizes almost arbitrarily wide up to the limits of the band (and also, as someone pointed out, the limits of your technology).
For whatever reason of physics, the natural 'bands' seem to get wider and wider and wider as frequencies increase.
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Dang we're spoiled because compared to digital footage from the late '90s-early 2000's this is still phenomenal.
DVDs were 480P for cryin' out loud! That was the high-quality hardcopy video format except for us laserdisc freaks.
DVDs were 480P for cryin' out loud! That was the high-quality hardcopy video format except for us laserdisc freaks.
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Because the moon is tidally locked to the earth, a lunar day is one month. A circular orbit of that period around an object with the moon’s mass would have a radius of about 93,000 km. Because of the presence of the earth, that is not a stable orbit.
The closest thing to what you’re describing is the Earth-moon L1 Lagrange point, the point between the earth’s and moon’s centers where their gravities balance. This is a viable location, but it’s about 58,000 km away from the moon, so the power needed to talk to it from the lunar surface would still be a lot more than that needed to talk to LLO.
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boydwaters
Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
Ford Aerospace → Space Systems/Loral → Maxis → Lanteris → Intuitive Machines
College era me fixed printers and Macintoshes for an office for a Ford Aerospace customer, across the street. It's a big campus. I suppose it should be obvious, but big spacecraft needs big clean room garage.
Nearly 40 years ago, they were also developing parts of the ISS.
More recently, Maxis built the Psyche asteroid probe, which includes the first deep-space high-bandwidth optical data link.
So I'd say they know a thing it two about building Lunar telemetry hardware with frickin' laser beams.
College era me fixed printers and Macintoshes for an office for a Ford Aerospace customer, across the street. It's a big campus. I suppose it should be obvious, but big spacecraft needs big clean room garage.
Nearly 40 years ago, they were also developing parts of the ISS.
More recently, Maxis built the Psyche asteroid probe, which includes the first deep-space high-bandwidth optical data link.
So I'd say they know a thing it two about building Lunar telemetry hardware with frickin' laser beams.
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I suspect it rotates with the azimuth axis of the telescope, and probably contains the receivers and their waveguides. (It's hard to make waveguides flex much.)
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Ars Legatus Legionis
Orion has returned from communication blackout, officially broken Apollo 13 speed record, went through a lunar eclipse of the sun (the bright dot confirmed to be venus). NASA reports the trajectory as Trans-Earth for the first time. Tomorrow is a slow day for the crew after the busy day today. Splashdown in about 4 days.
NASA heard Pilot Glover was calling NASA in the blind for three minutes before the forward link completed. Also the crew reported seeing the flashes of two meteor impacts on the far side of the moon. Crew reported being able to make out the color of Mars. Not sure if that was on the far side of the moon or in the lunar eclipse.
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Oh sure.
Who lived the early TV days know how different VHF can behave from UHF. Same for the early GSM days here in Italy the third operator "Wind" was considered a second tier one for more than a decade just because they had 1800Mhz frequencies only V.S. the common 900MHz spectrum used by the other two.
And that just to mention two everyday consumer electronics examples (using bordering spectrum).
How not to mention the AM Vatican Radio that used to be able to circle the planet three times using a single (500KW) transmitter located north from Rome, and that was receivable in a New Zeland basement. Same for radio Moscow.
The whole matter is huge and for sure can't be exhausted in a couple of forum messages.
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Perhaps a surprising thing happened (and it's still happening right now)....
While is not an event that will end in the history books, I realized that while I was watching the moon, a splendid moon was starring at me trough my windows.
Given how angled and positioned my house is, this is something that happens very rarely, not exactly a "once in a lifetime" event but very very rare. Nice and curios it's happening right now.
While is not an event that will end in the history books, I realized that while I was watching the moon, a splendid moon was starring at me trough my windows.
Given how angled and positioned my house is, this is something that happens very rarely, not exactly a "once in a lifetime" event but very very rare. Nice and curios it's happening right now.
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If you go to the gallery and replace "~large.jpg" with "~orig.jpg", you can get the EXIF data with camera/lens combinations:
"NIKON D5": "AF Nikkor 35mm f/2D", "AF-S Nikkor 80-400mm f/4.5-5.6G ED VR", "AF-S Zoom-Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8G ED".
"Nikon Z 9": "AF Nikkor 35mm f/2D", "AF-S Nikkor 80-400mm f/4.5-5.6G ED VR".
And for completeness:
"iPhone 17 Pro Max": "iPhone 17 Pro Max front camera 2.715mm f/1.9", "iPhone 17 Pro Max back triple camera 6.765mm f/1.78".
"HERO4 Black": (no lens data)
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Thanks, I was wondering what focal lengths they were using on the Nikon's.
Edit: Downloaded the one of him shaving using the iPhone as a mirror. It's the 14-24 f/2.8 at 24 on the D5. Cool!
Edit: And one of the moon shots is the 80.0-400.0 mm f/4.5-5.6 used at 200 mm on the D5. That's closer to what I expected for out the window moon / planet shots. Apparently, they have a selection of lenses.
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Yeah, I'm not an idiot, thanks. It's just that I'm clearly talking about the body not the lenses, and I also know some other information you're leaving out. Like the fact that good IBIS can provide more stops of compensation than in-lens at wide to moderate angles, like they'd be using for the inside of the spacecraft, and in modern cameras, IBIS can cooperate with the in-lens stabilization to achieve a higher total, meaning an unstabilized body is still worse than a stabilized one when that is desired. In-lens stabilization is still valuable for longer lenses, but past long lenses didn't have that many stops of stabilization, so sometimes pure IBIS wouldn't even be that far behind. Assuming they're using the equipment we think they are, then even if it's the newer version of that 80-400, a cameralabs review suggests you might expect 3 stops at 400mm out of its rated 4, and I think they did a good job to get that much from it. I think I could also get 4 or better at the wide end of its range (80mm) on ibis alone with my non-nikon camera, but would quickly get down to 1 or very optimistically 2 stops at the narrow end, which shows the tradeoff.
Anyway, they brought a Z9 too, and the point was just that out of D5 vs D850, I felt like D5 made at least as much sense as D850, perhaps more since it sounds like they're used to it and it has convenient sports-shooter low light features, and if they really wanted to change things up they could look at newer stuff with more differences instead of the d850.
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Just to broaden the camera considerations a bit, dynamic range is a large factor in this campaign. Lots of different illumination intensities make a single capture covering them all without either blowing through the sensor saturation and on the other end have large regions in the nether values near black, challenging. Here you'll find DR graphs of the D6, D850, and Z9 for comparison:
https://www.photonstophotos.net/Charts/PDR.htm
Best camera for DR at all ISOs is the D850, more recent sensor than the D6. IMHO the best all-round camera for the mission is the Z9, decent DR performance and no flappy-mirror, something else to break.
Edit: forgot a word.
https://www.photonstophotos.net/Charts/PDR.htm
Best camera for DR at all ISOs is the D850, more recent sensor than the D6. IMHO the best all-round camera for the mission is the Z9, decent DR performance and no flappy-mirror, something else to break.
Edit: forgot a word.
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[off topic remark:] Those comments are largely mis-informed, but I hope they were not the reason for that account being banned.
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Ars Legatus Legionis
He has been basically just trolling SpaceX fanboys for the last week rather than just be happy about the success of SLS. Every thread even if nobody mentions SpaceX. He likely did it one too many times. Usually the post resulting the ban had a moderation note so it likely isn't this one.
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Hey, relax!
Being aware or not of a technicality doesn't make you or anyone else an idiot or a genius.
I just explained the difference, if you were already aware of it, good for you, but other people may find my message helpful and / or informative.
That's all.
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Err, no, you didn't "just" explain the differences. You spoke the way an expert speaks to a student, instead of treating strangers as peers until proven otherwise, or at least giving me the benefit of the doubt, and I pushed back for a moment before going into more detail about the topic. What you responded to was a comment about the suitability of certain camera bodies for this mission - D5 vs D850 vs any other alternatives. If someone offers an opinion about that, they probably believe that they know about one or more differences they think will matter.
You originally said that I had concluded that the astronauts don't have stabilization, and you attempted to teach me/us in simple language why this was wrong - but I never thought that in the first place. If you had cared about granting me the benefit of the doubt, you may have thought to yourself "This guy should know stabilized lenses exist if he's willing to suggest which equipment to use. Is it really more likely that he doesn't know lens stabilization exists, even though he would find out immediately if he did his due diligence before commenting, or is it more likely he was saying something else entirely?" Then, by looking for a more courteous and charitable interpretation before passing judgement, you might decide it's possible that what I actually meant was just that neither the D5 nor the D850 have stabilization built in, which is true.
My unsolicited opinion is that you would come across less condescendingly if you made an effort to leave room for the possibility that the person you're talking to said what they said for a good reason. Even if you were sure I was wrong, you could have said something like "What if the lenses have stabilization?" (This leaves the possibilities open) And I could have just said "The lenses might, but neither of these two bodies have it built in and that's why I think they should look for a body that does" and nobody would have been rude to the other.
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My dad was actually remarking how the launch video quality (tracking of the rocket and image quality breaking-up-pixelating) was MUCH worse than he remembers of the Apollo mission TV broadcasts. We were wondering why they seemed to be so bad quality with such modern tech.
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Ars Legatus Legionis
Digital vs analog. Analog noise is more natural looking it is easier for us to humans filter out. Digital noise is more jarring and sometimes can lead to an entire loss of frame. I would add though that your dad expectations were also lower and nostalgia has filled in the blanks of that very detail limited early footage. Like people which remember how great a video game is and then are shocked playing it again after 30 years.
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