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Astronauts have been carrying cameras into space since Gherman Titov flew on Vostok 2, humanity’s most prominent memories of space exploration have been thanks to cameras which were adapted for spaceflight, modified to solve problems that would never be encountered on the ground, or to give them capabilities that were ahead of their time.Selected References:
National Air & Space Museum
https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/another-journey-john-glenn%E2%80%99s-ansco-camera
Hasselblad
https://www.hasselblad.com/history/hasselblad-in-space/
Nikon
https://www.nikon.com/about/corporate/history/chronology/1946/index.htm
Cole Rise details on the Hasselblad modifications
https://www.spacecamera.co/
Timm Chapman’s pages on NASA Nikons
https://www.timmchapman.com/page/nasa-nikons/
GO KODAK!!
Does anyone know where Scott got the Lego Saturn V launch tower?
Didn’t Gordon Cooper take pictures of ship wrecks ๐ค
Which cammera took the legendary Earth Rise photo?
All those Nikon cameras and yet Ashton Kutcher couldn’t lobby for a ride to the ISS.
Hello
Ny Con? I’ve actually never heard it pronounced that way here in Australia. Also, are Hasselblad out of business?
Love your content
honestly surprised how early NASA adopted digital cameras. Convenience and speed is a big factor, but you can get so much more detail from 70mm and even 35mm film than an early 6MP sensor
Nice one sir !
What camera would be used if (when) NASA landed on the moon in the 2020s?
I have several Minolta cameras, including a HiMatic. Rokkor was MInolta’s lens maker; they tend to be fantastically sharp lenses. It’s really a shame Konica-Minolta got out of the photography business.
nearly first
5 flat earthers disliked this video
Awww, you’re not going to shame Alan Bean for burning out the tube on Apollo 12’s TV camera?
27th !
Thanks for this review of NASA camera history. As both a film camera hobbyist and life long follower of space exploration, this is a double whammy for me. Maybe sublimely I must have known. Iโve been a Nikon shooter for 30-years. Good enough for NASA, good enough for me.
Using a selenium cell in *space* is a nice touch.
Eventually, Canon may make a debut in space flight. Maybe. Iโm not very into the camera world.
Thanks Scott
21th
Actually, early this year Nasa replaced their D5 by sending fifty D6 (or rather D5S should I said…) to the ISS, so the D6 is the current main DSLR body on the station.
Yo Scott, did you buy the parts kit for the Saturn V launch tower, or did you buy the pieces individually?
Awesome, that silver Nasa Hasselblad… sexy as heck.
Very cool ty for this.
Maybe @kosmonavtika has some info about Soviet cameras ?
I wonder what Tom Cruise is going to film on?
Awesome!
I think there’s also a Sony a7 onboard the ISS, but it’s only for video if I remember correctly
How about the Starizona Hyperstar mounted on a Celestron C9.25. A 9.25 inch wide f/2 lens! They use it for taking high resolution pictures of the ground. I have Hyperstar for my C8, which is pointed upwards, mostly.
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/servir/servir_iss_120415.html
Film for the win!
Adam Savage has a detailed video discussing the NASA Nikon cameras and builds a replica camera and cover on the Tested channel.
Of course they dont use the best of all cameras, the P100, in Space, or they wouldnt find the curvature
(this message may contain traces of irony)
I’ve always been facinated by the video cameras used by NASA. The signal from the color cameras used by Apollo had to fit into a much smaller bandwidth than the 6 Mhz used by NTSC cameras at the time. A low frame rate black and white camera with a spinning color wheel was used to send field sequential color pictures from surface of the moon on Apollo 14-17 The Space Shuttle cameras used a similar system with the color wheel built into the lens. That way the Shuttle camers could all be the same model black and white vidicon camera just with different lenses. Even though some were updated, the monochrome cameras in the Shuttle bay continued to use the vidicon cameras well into the 1990’s because of their superior low light capability.
Very interesting video!
Also a D5 and a D850 make a good pair.
What about Gagarine and Salyut/Mir missions?
What cameras were placed on the soviet missions to Venus and how were they able to transmit the images back to earth?
In a studio
Its getting to the point where it would be cheaper to retrieve the Hasselblads left on the moon than buy one on eBay.
this was really only focused on still cameras. you didn’t really bring up the dozens of movie and TV cameras
Good one! Very interesting.
Love the shirt Scott. Hope youve checked out the Nomai shuttles. Thanks to you and KSP I was able to fly them no problem!
Hasselblad’s marketing hasn’t really changed for 50 years with their ‘first on the moon theme’
I like that one of the first space cameras is a homonym for Laika
I wonder if the tiny chip gyros in our phones are sensitive enough to perform that function of knowing where the camera was pointed. I would imagine it’s movement was measured in microns.
#500! Now this, as a photographer, is really fascinating.
thanks youtube for the notification 4 minutes late
makes me and my nikon d70 feel special.
Nice topic. Found the history of film development during WW2 with EG&G fascinating .Count me in.
Gregory Olsen, one of the early tourists to ISS, lost his camera there. All the photos he took were on it. Never found out if it resurfaced.
Finding film and getting it processed may cost as much as the camera nowadays. ๐
Please make a video on how the fuel pumps, i mean how the valves work to set the correct percentage of thrust
Once again proving how much innovation the space program generates.
i hear apple has decided to stay in china, what a bummer
So, a history of some cameras in space
The vlog-style video of Chris Cassidy experiencing the demo 2 launch was awesome, but wow, some of the dslr cameras they have up on station are pretty well shot… (Shot noise pun intended…)
What a great vid! Loved it. Thank you.
Fascinating! Thank you, sir.
I bought an old medium format camera last year, and haven’t used it yet. I also have a Nikon 35mm camera. Neither of them need batteries to operate. This video is inspiring me to go out and shoot. ๐ธ
I’ve got a Selenium photo cell in my Olympus OM2!
So much time and energy being spent on this round earth conspiracy. These guys have been at it for decades.
Love the t-shirt!
Great subject for this video, very interesting, thanks!
I misread the title as “How Astronauts Capture Ironic Space Photos”
Think about that:we went to the moon. Just think about that. I wonder what that was like, being there.
Hey Scott, have you heard of the stealth attack helicopter The Sting built in Area 51?
excellent Hasselblad film camera in space
so glad the moon was shot with Hasselblad lol
for artistic reasons !! yes a new market
I love seeing non film photographers talking about film photography. Idk why. I just like to see it acknowledged
6:43 I see what you did there
Scott, thanks for once more going into a subject that most of the other common space centered YouTube channels don’t cover. Your fascination with the “other” things connected to space gives us lots of very interesting insights into the space programs.
I got me a Nikon camera,
I love to take a photograph
โHulloโ
Hey Scott! Great video!
I would have loved to have heard about the Linhof though, that took some insane pictures through the shuttle era since they were large format! They had specialty LF cameras before, but the Linhof I think that was from 1990 to around 2000 or so? There’s a training video floating around of astronauts using the Linhod on earth.
And the longevity of the Hasselblads can’t be overstated, the last pictures they took with them (that I can find on their archives) were around 2002-2003, of course using the latest series of 70mm Hasselblads at the time (the 200 series).
It would be interesting to know the magnification of the camera lens and why they picked it (e.g. 200 mm equivalent for 35 mm format)
Can we send up some vintage cameras with Crew 1 ๐ฅ
Scott Manley, have you done a video of cameras capturing Space Shuttle flights?
Edit: This video got uploaded on my 19th birthday! ๐๐ปโโ๏ธ๐๐๐
3:35 baller status – 2 watches
I was hoping you do a video on the camera the astronauts used to take pictures of the monolith in 2001:A Space Odyssey.
That camera looks like it was built in someones back yard.
I showed this episode to my wife, a professional photographer, she was very impressed. Thank you for all the hard work you do researching and making these episodes.
Light should fly safe.
So I go and look up that Hasselblad camera on B&H since I figure they are who would sell such a botique camera and yea they are certainly not consumer cameras. 6k for just the camera body. Though I am sure they take fantastic photos for those who use a camera to make a living.
RADIATION damage on cameras can be seen in the inflatable module video, where they first enter it, the dark of the chamber highlights the myriad of holes punched through the sensor.
11:00 “The camera knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn’t.” ๐
The Cosmosphere in Kansas has a great collection and display of cameras used during apollo and shuttle missions.
Listened to you for years. Since I got into kerbal. Iโm on the dumb end of attention span. I come back now and again and tour amazing mate. Sending love
I have a Nikon F5 and love it. I’ll gladly take a Hasselblad 500c as well if someone is handing them out.
My dad was a big-time photographer in his early years, especially when he was stationed in Japan during his time in the USAF. He used a Nikon F body with an exposure meter viewfinder for much of the time he used that camera. He did a lot of his own processing and enlarging. That said, he would have likely loved this video. As someone who followed in his footsteps in that bit of enthusiasm, I thoroughly enjoyed this.
“one of the most significant things brought to space on John Glenns first orbital flight was something he bought in a store”
becase, as we know, most items brought to space were stolen.
I remember trying to get pictures of stars with a kit lens!!!!!
“Astronomy’s much more fun when you’re not an astronomer.”
~Brian May
7:53 “I don’t have time to go into detail on this”
you underestimate your core audience, sir
I love that you love to talk about space hardware. I love it even more that you record yourself doing such things and then allow me to absorb all that delicious space knowledge.
I’m a bit of a film photography nerd, so one of my favourite bits of space photography is how Luna 3 got pictures of the far side of the moon in 1959. It had a film camera, took the pictures, then developed the film onboard, scanned it with a cathode ray tube and a photomultiplier, and transmitted the pictures back as an analog video signal. Pretty amazing stuff.
I came here from Marathoning SciManDan and his compilation of flerfers who say no-one ever proved curvature. This is a refresher. Thanks.
History of space cameras is an intresting idea.
You forgot probably the biggest, highest resolution camera that flew on Shuttle missions – the IMAX movie camera. I went to a talk at the National Air and Space Museum given by one of the principals for that program coincident with the premiere of “The Dream is Alive”, the first IMAX film shot in space in 1984. It was really quite interesting! Consider that the IMAX film format is just frigging HUGE – 70mm, so the film reels are quite massive… and they spin! With enough angular momentum that the gyroscopic effects assert themselves if you want to pan the camera during a shoot. I think I recall that a single reel of film was something like 3 minutes of shooting time.
On subsequent missions, I believe they had an IMAX camera in the payload bay.
This guy Should Be a Astronaut ๐ฉ๐ผโ๐
In a few years, space tourists will just use their phone cameras.