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Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Lunar Orbiter

The Lunar Orbiter spacecraft were used to take a close look at the Moon for potential landing sites for Apollo. Later, it did a more general survey of the Moon and produced closeups of a number of features of interest on the Moon before Apollo orbited the Moon at the end of the 1960s. The spacecraft used two cameras, one with a narrow field of view and the other with a wider field of view, imaging on film which was developed onboard the spacecraft before being scanned and transmittted electronically back to Earth. You can see the twin lenses of the camera system near the center of the spacecraft. Lunar Orbiter II took an oblique image of the prominant crater Copernicus which was called the "Photo of the Century" at the time it was published. This Lunar Orbiter hangs above LM-2. This image was taken at 49mm focal length with an exposure of 1/125 seconds at f/5.6, ISO 1600.
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