MQF Interior

Imagine living & riding in this little trailer for about a day with 2 other guys who you just flew back from the Moon with! In order to decrease the reflections, I used a yellow filtered B&W conversion which also gave the best contrast between the seats and their surroundings. Several support personel entered the MQF and the 21 day quarantine with the Apollo crews returning from the first moonwalks. The first 3 landing crews were subjected to the quarantine just to be safe and used 3 different MQFs. This image was taken at 18mm focal length with an exposure of 1/13 seconds at f/5.0, ISO 800.

MQF

This is the MQF - the Mobile Quarantine Facility - at the Udvar-Hazy Center of the National Air & Space Museum. It was used to isolate the crew of Apollo 11 after the first Moonlandings in order to be sure that the crew did not carry any dangerous lunar germs. The crew donned isolation garments before being hoisted into the recovery helicopter and then once on the Aircraft Carrier "Hornet", they entered this airstream which was then transported back to the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston where they stayed in quarantine for 3 weeks after landing. This image was taken at 18mm focal length with an exposure of 1/50 seconds at f/5.0, ISO 800.

Enterprise

This is another view of Enterprise and the space gallery at the Udvar-Hazy Center of the Air & Space Museum. There are lots of really cool things in this area. Rockets, satellites, manned spacecraft, spacesuits, and even the MQF. "What?", you are probably asking is an MQF? I'll show you in my next entry..... This image was taken at 18mm focal length with an exposure of 1/100 seconds at f/6.3, ISO 800.

Spitfire

This British Spitfire sits across the gallery from the Me-109. This image was taken at 18mm focal length with an exposure of 1/30 seconds at f/3.5, ISO 800.

Me109

The Air & Space Museum has some excellent displays of planes and jets. This Messersmitt 109 resides in an impressive collection of WWII fighters. This image was taken at 18mm focal length with an exposure of 1/20 seconds at f/3.5, ISO 800.

Apollo-Soyuz

In 1975, the superpowers first attempt at cooperation in space - the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) flew the last Apollo mission into space to dock with a Soyuz spacecraft in Earth orbit. A special docking adaptor was used to mate the two spacecraft which each used rather different docking mechanisms. This effort led eventually to cooperative ventures in space including shuttle flights to the Mir space station and now the International Space Station. This exhibit in the Air & Space Museum shows the size of both spacecraft, both in relative and absolute scales. This image was taken at 18mm focal length with an exposure of 1/160 seconds at f/5.6, ISO 1600.

Explorer 1

This is a replica of the Explorer 1 spacecraft in the Air & Space Museum. It hangs roughly directly above the Viking lander. Explorer 1 was the first United States satellite and is credited with discovering the Van Allen radiation belts. It was launched on a Jupiter rocket in January 1958. This image was taken at 238mm focal length with an exposure of 1/160 seconds at f/6.3, ISO 1600.

Viking Lander

Two Viking landers successfully landed on Mars in 1976, the first on the 7th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon on July 20. The thing I remember most about that is that we were traveling across country, moving from New York to Seattle and passed through Salt Lake City at that time. When I saw the newspaper the next day and they had the first picture from Viking 1 on the surface of Mars, I thought "Sheesh! The landscape we just drove through looks just like that!" Nowadays, the images by our landers and rovers on Mars make me want to go take a hike over to the hills in the distance. This image was taken at 18mm focal length, with an exposure of 1/125 seconds at f/4.5, ISO 800.

Surveyor

The Surveyor Spacecraft landed on the Moon before the Apollo missions in order to study the surface characteristics as well as places that Apollo might not be able to get to. The Surveyor 3 spacecraft was even visited by the Apollo 12 astronauts. They brought back the scoop and the television camera that it carried to study the longterm affects of exposure to the lunar environment. This exhibit hangs above the LM and right next to the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft. This image was taken at 22mm focal length with an expsoure of 1/160 seconds at f/5.6, ISO 1600.

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.

Spaceship One

Spaceship One hangs in the main gallery at the Air & Space Museum, not far from Columbia. Behind it you can see the Bell X-1 airplane that Chuck Yeager flew past the speed of sound for the first time and to its left is Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis. Spaceship One carried the first private pilot into Space, rocketing to an altitude of just over 100 kilometers. This image was taken at 55mm focal length with an exposure of 1/60 seconds at f/5.6, ISO 400.

Apollo 11 CM

The Apollo 11 CM "Columbia" is a big attraction at the Air & Space Museum. There wasn't a moment that it did not have a crowd around it. It is amazing to consider that of the Saturn V launch vehicle that left Earth on July 16, 1969 - all 363 feet of it, only this tiny capsule returned to Earth on July 24 after the successful landing on the 20th. This image was taken at 70mm focal length with an exposure of 1/160 seconds at f/6.3, ISO 1600.

3D LM

This 3D anaglyph of the Lunar Module at the Air & Space Museum was made with Stereo Picture Maker. You'll need your red-cyan anaglyph glasses to see it properly.

Majestic Enterprise

It's hard to imagine just how big a Space Shuttle is, but you can get an idea at the Udvar-Hazy Center of the National Air & Space Museum near Dulles Airport by standing right next to one. This is the Shuttle Enterprise which has never flown in space, but was used in the late 1970s in drop tests to qualify the Shuttles for their gliding landings, as well as in launch pad fit tests at the Kennedy Space Center long before a space worthy orbiter was ready to fly. This view of Enterprise was taken from the center of the NASM annex. You can also see an astronaut in an MMU hanging above and left of the orbiter. This image was taken with the kit lens at 53mm focal length with an exposure of 1/80 seconds at f/5.6, ISO 800.

Landing Gear attach point, LM-2

This is a closeup of the mounting point on the outriggers of the landing gear on LM-2 in the National Air & Space Museum. After orbiting around the LM with a wider angle lens, I put on my 70-300mm zoom and started taking closeups of details of the vehicle. I wanted to see the nuts and bolts up close. This image was taken at 119mm focal length with an exposure of 1/200 seconds at f/4.5, ISO 3200.

Another view of LM-2

Another view - this one from ground level - of LM-2 in the National Air & Space Museum in Washington DC. This image was taken with the kit lens at 18mm focal length with an exposure of 1/250 seconds at f/5.6, ISO 1600.

LM-2

LM-2 was to be used for the 2nd unmanned test flight of a Lunar Module in Earth orbit, but the flight of LM-1 went so well, that LM-2 was not needed. Since it was an early production model intended for unmanned flight, it remained the only early production Lunar Module that didn't get used for manned tests. So when it was donated to the Smithsonian and prepared for display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, it was redressed to look like LM-5 which carried the first crew of humans to the surface of the Moon in July 1969 as the Eagle of Apollo 11. This image was taken with the kit lens at 18mm focal length with an exposure of 1/60 seconds at f/4, ISO 400.