Charles Apple

July 20 — next Monday — will mark the 40th anniversary of man’s first landing on the moon.

And like any other space-crazy kid of that era, I can tell you exactly where I was that Sunday afternoon: We were on the way home from visiting my dad’s grandmother in Greensboro, N.C. We listened via the car radio and pulled over in a Sky City department store to watch the landing itself in the TV department — surrounded by TVs, in fact.

This was taken around the time of the Apollo 11 mission. I was seven years old. Those are Estes-brand model rockets that my dad built and flew for me, 40 years ago. I loved anything having to do with space. I still do.
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We arrived home in Saluda, S.C., later that afternoon. We sat up very, very late and watched astronauts walk on the moon.

And I devoured every minute of it.

So naturally, I’m curious to see how newspapers play the 40th anniversary this week and next.

First, a quick timeline of how the thing unfolded (all times Eastern):

• July 16, 9:32 a.m.: Liftoff from Cape Canaveral, Fla.
• July 20, 4:17 p.m.: Landing on the moon
• July 20, 10:56 p.m.: First footprint on the moon
• July 21, 1:11 a.m.: Moonwalk ends
• July 24, 12:50 p.m.: Splashdown in the Pacific

The Huntsville Times fired an early shot today with this wonderful front page:

Why Huntsville?, I hear you ask. Huntsville is where the major components of the Saturn V rocket were developed. So this is a huge, local story for the Times.

Times design director Tim Ball tells me:

I designed this one and the special section (a 20-page tab) and wrote the display type. Hope it catches a few extra eyes in the racks today.

NASA has a pretty incredible public archive of images, so it was really just a matter of combing through a few thousand to find the right ones. We used the iconic images from the moon landing in the special section, so I wanted something a little more evocative of the emotions stirred up by space travel for the front page. (The moonrise picture, obviously, was not from Apollo 11.)

In addition, the Times will begin running historical page reprints on Thursday — the anniversary of the actual launch of Apollo 11.

Unfortunately, the Times didn’t post any of the stories from its special section online today. Or, if they did, I can’t find them. Tim — who, I might add, is off this weekend — was kind enough to send along this snapshot of the tab cover:

Newsday, too, ran stories today about local people and their role in putting man on the moon. Here’s their cover, which refers to stories inside and online:

Clicking on the Summer of ‘69: Moon Landing icon on the Newsday web site proved frustrating. You’re immediately taken to a page that contains all the links and slideshows commemorating Apollo 11. However, a very nice audio slideshow starts up immediately:

My guess it that the extra audio-visual demands are bogging down Newsday’s servers. Suggestion: Never put auto-playing audio or video anywhere on your web site. Give readers the option to choose whether or not they want to watch your video. Or whether or not they want to wait for the damn thing to load.

Once past that, though, the Newsday articles are very interesting reading. The lunar module used on the Apollo missions was designed and built on Long Island. You’ll find stories there about that and many other aspects of Apollo 11, including the debate over just what really were Neil Armstrong’s first words on the moon. In addition, there are readers’ memories of Apollo 11 and nostalgic memories of other events of that summer. Find it all here.

The Cincinnati Enquirer today ran a page-one story about the tiny Ohio town of Wapakoneta will celebrate the accomplishments of Armstrong, its most famous native, this week:

Armstrong grew up in Wapa, attended Purdue and, after his retirement from NASA, taught engineering at the University of Cincinnati. He lives in Cincinnati today.

But the Armstrong Air & Space museum in Wapakoneta may have to close down soon, due to funding problems, the Enquirer reports. Read the story for yourself here. And don’t miss the slide show.

The Enquirer, however, wins my Loser of the Day award for posting this photo and cutline on its web site:

My beefs with this picture:

1. It’s flopped.
2. It’s misidentified. In fact, that’s Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, not Armstrong.
3. It’s a NASA photo and deserves a NASA credit. I mean, did the GNS send a staffer to the Sea of Tranquility to shoot that? I don’t think so.

Now, I’m not sure who gets the blame here. Were these the Enquirer’s mistakes? Or were they the fault of the Gannett News Service?

Who cares? Wrong is wrong. So shame on all involved here.

For the record, here is the original shot, unflopped and uncropped:

Credit for this photo and most that follow: NASA.
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We know that’s Aldrin and not Armstrong, because Armstrong was carrying the camera, attached to a bracket on the front of his suit.

In fact, here’s some little-known trivia: If you track down the high-resolution scan of this photo — known as AS11-40-5875 — and zoom way, way in on the helmet, you can actually see Buzz, craning his neck though his helmet to see whether or not Neil is done taking the picture:

The helmet visors were coated with a gold film to strain out the worst of the sun’s rays. Normally, you can’t see the astronauts through the visor. But something about the angle of this shot, and the way the sun is illuminating Buzz’ face, makes it happen here.

Nearly every photo you’ve ever seen from Apollo 11 is of Buzz Aldrin, not Neil Armstrong. Why is this?

Neil Armstrong, during a dress-rehearsal at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, April, 1969. Strapped to his chest is a Hasselblad 500EL camera loaded with Kodak 70 mm film. He could shoot 160 pictures without reloading.
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It’s because the astronauts carried only one still camera with them as they spent two-and-a-half hours walking on the moon that night. Neil took a lot of photos that included Buzz. But the few photos Buzz took didn’t include a lot of Neil.

In Buzz’ defense, he had little time with the camera and was assigned specific engineering-type things to shoot. Which is why the only photos we have today of Armstrong look like this:

Hey, Gannett News Service. That’s a photo of Neil Armstrong’s butt. Why didn’t you move that one?

Here’s another one, from a series where Buzz was tasked to spin around and shoot a series of photos to be stitched together into a panorama:

I’ve cropped out the entire bottom half of the picture, which is all shadow. But if you zoom in even more, you can see Neil a little better:

And that’s it. The only decent high-resolution photo of Neil Armstrong on the surface of the moon. And he appears to be checking the spark plugs on the lunar module or something.

Now, in fact, there are low-rez shots of Armstrong on the moon, scanned from the automatic 16-mm movie camera mounted inside the lander. That’s from where pictures like this came:

The black thing in the far right is a rocket thruster on the side of the module. The little white thing at the very top right of the frame is the TV camera Neil set up as soon as he stepped out.

This same movie camera allows us this interesting photo of Armstrong:

I’ve cropped and zoomed in quite a bit, but I think you’ll be able to see Neil’s face inside his helmet. In this photo, he’s actually opened his gold visor in order to check on the color of the lunar surface.

And, immediately after, he closes the visor again:

Which was important. Without things like a Van Allen belt or an ozone layer to protect him, the sun’s rays would have fried his face pretty quickly.

And, of course, there’s this photo of Armstrong in the lunar module, exhausted but elated after the historic moonwalk:

I cropped this one a little loosely so you can see the real space-age hero, on the bulkhead behind him: Duct tape. I’m still waiting to see the 20-page special tab celebrating the history of duct tape.

And, of course, as you put together your own 40th anniversary photo essays this week, be wary of using this shot, arguably one of the most famous photographs of all time:

Why? Because, as we reported back in March, that photo — released by NASA’s publicity folks in 1969 as 69-HC-684 — is altered from the original frame. The familiar handout photo is on the left; the original shot by Neil Armstrong — officially called AS11-40-5903 — is on the right:

Yep. Neil cut off part of Buzz’ head in that photo! Read more about that here.

If you’re looking for an unusual shot your readers likely haven’t seen before, consider this one. I call it: “Small step? Small step, my ass!”

That’s Armstrong at the Kennedy Space Center in April 1969, working out how he’ll get up and down the ladder of the lunar module. The lowest rung, as you can see, is a good two or three feet high.

However, the moon’s gravitational pull is only 1/6th that of Earth’s. Therefore, including his bulky suit and backpack, Armstrong weighed a total of about 60 lbs. So hopping up and down the ladder proved to be no big deal.

Keep in mind that you can use any photos you want from the NASA archives on this or any story. The rule is: If the U.S. taxpayers paid for it, then it’s in the public domain. Just make sure you credit NASA.

Here, you’ll find an incredible walk through every frame shot by the Apollo 11 astronauts. Not just low- and high-rez scans, but also the story behind the image in each frame. Here’s a diagram that documents every photo taken during the moonwalk.

Go here to learn more about the photography techniques and equipment used by Apollo astronauts.

Find everything there is to know about the moon missions here. Find additional material here and here. NASA has set up an official 40th anniversary site here.

And, y’know, only an idiot would still want to cater to the nutcases out there who claim we didn’t really land on the moon 40 years ago. I hope you won’t feed their egos by mentioning them in your newspapers. If you must, though, you can find online resources for refuting this crap here and here.

Are you doing anything cool for the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11? Send us your pages, special sections, links or whatever.

…Oh, and for those of you who don’t care about space travel but read this far anyway, here’s another tip: The evening of Saturday the 18th will mark the 40th anniversary of the Chappaquiddick incident with Ted Kennedy.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 12th, 2009 at 2:20 pm and is filed under News design, Photojournalism, Web news design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.