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Thursday, August 09, 2007

70mm Hasselblad magazine

Back in the National Air & Space Museum in the Space gallary, I found this Hasselblad 70mm film magazine. Apollo used several of these magazines which contained different types of film, typically a black and white film and a version of Ektrachrome. The top of the magazine shows a decal that helps the crewman select the best exposure. This image was taken at 24mm focal length with an exposure of 1/20 seconds at f/1.8.
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2 comments:

Tuguldur said...

wow, thats marvelous!

I had heard that ASU is starting a project to 'digitize' the apollo film pictures, and if I remember correctly they're going to make a library constituting from over 36000 pictures and 20000 of them are 60mm Hasselblad frames!

I guess the others are some 35mm frames and some mapping camera, panoramic camera frames, though.

In fact how big is that magazine? It looks kinda small?...

Jim said...

I've heard about the ASU project and can't wait to see its products! And they are doing a better job than what was done a couple years ago at Johnson Spaceflight Center with both higher physical resolution and a wider dynamic range and more bits in the digitization. JSC only did the Hasselblad frames but not the mapping camera and pan camera frames. Those are spectacular orbital images which I've used before for stereo, for example.

The magazine is a bit larger than the 70mm width of the film. I'll put up an image of another exhibit that shows the front of a magazine which might give you a better idea of the size since it shows the approximately 58mm size of the film that is exposed. They also had a Hasselblad camera similar to what was used during Apollo 11. Maybe I'll post 2 pictures for tomorrows entry.... Later, I'll post an image of one or two of the spacesuits (which I think shows the bracket on the chest RCU on which the camera was mounted while the astronaut worked on the surface).

You'll have to take a trip to Washington sometime and wander around the Air & Space Museum (not to mention all the other museums and monuments there!).