Video Technology

Why were the TV pictures so bad?

The Apollo missions took video cameras with them.  Motion film cameras would just be too bulky and problematic to operate in a vacuum.   The problem with the video cameras of the 1960s was they were a technology in its infancy.  Some were used in TV studios, but these were far too big and required professional camera men to operate them.   So NASA spent a great deal of money in developing and buying the latest technology for portable video cameras.  These were cameras that wouldn't be available commercially for at least another 5 years.  They were amazing at the time, but, quite frankly, rubbish by today's standards. 

That was before we even consider the difficulties in broadcasting the video signal back to the Earth.   And once these images arrived the best way to convert the signal to TV standards was actually by recording the pictures directly from a screen.  So the pictures we now have were taken by some of the first video cameras, in the most hostile conditions ever experienced by man, transmitted from further away than anyone had ever been before, and then filmed off an ordinary TV screen.   Sometimes we need reminding just how amazing an achievement it was to get these pictures at all, no matter how fuzzy they turned out.

However, these problems are ignored in some of the hoax theories that claim the quality of the TV pictures should have been better and indicate fakery.  NASA deliberately made the them poor to disguise their hoax.  Seems like they just can't win.  The photos are too good, so it's a fake.  But the TV pictures are too bad, so it's a fake.

Click here for more info on the 'TV' cameras on the Apollo missions.

This link is to the same Australian site and tells the fascinating story of how most of the lunar TV pictures came via a receiving satellite dish in Australia and the difficulties that went with it.   It's also recently been made into a film called 'The Dish'.     If this was all a hoax someone would have had to bribe all these people too!  What's interesting here is the TV audience in Australia actually got the pictures before NASA.