Charles Apple

You’re familiar with this, right? One of the most famous photographs of all time:

Well, guess what? It was altered!

That photo was released in 1969 by NASA as 69-HC-684. You’ll see it again on the left, here. But on the right is a more recent scan of the original frame, as shot by astronaut Neil Armstrong (click for a larger view):

How about that! The man who snapped that historic photo — Armstrong cut off the top of Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin’s head. I’m glad to see my wife isn’t the only one who does this sort of thing.

Before 69-HC-684 was released, a NASA artist — presumably — drew in the top of Aldrin’s life-support backpack and added quite a bit of sky.Not with Photoshop, though — after all, this picture was taken 21 years before Photoshop was commercially available.

Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and
Edwin Aldrin look over the freshly-developed film upon their
return to Earth. The crew used Hasselblad 500EL cameras,
loaded with Kodak 70 mm film in magazines that would allow
160 pictures without reloading.
—

One of the reasons this has been detected: A small antenna atop Aldrin’s backpack should be visible against the velvety-black sky.

Dr. Eric M. Jones, who describes himself thusly…

My main area of expertise was in finite-difference simulations of things like atmospheric fireballs, supernova-remnant evolution, and seismic wave propagation.

…wrote about this photo on the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, part of the vast NASA online collection.

Handout photo 69-HC-684 — the altered version — went on to become a huge icon of the 1960s:

The actual raw photo, for what it’s worth, is cataloged in the NASA archives as AS11-40-5903. As you begin working on the 40th anniversary pages to run in July, you might want to make sure you use the original.

If you use this image at all. You might be wise to pass it by. After all, it’s one small step from that photo to something like this, which was soundly criticized two months ago. And that’s one not-so-giant leap away from this.

Find the Aollo Lunar Surface Journal here. Read more about NASA photography techniques here.

Oh, while we’re thinking about it: Please don’t let us catch this URL being passed around by all those nut cases who don’t think man really landed on the moon in 1969. Just because NASA fudged the sky on this photo doesn’t mean we didn’t go to the moon.

Those consipracy theorists need help. Find it here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 12th, 2009 at 6:16 am and is filed under Photojournalism, Visual ethics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.