Friday’s Apollo tribute pages
There weren’t a lot of Apollo 11 tribute pages published today. But that’s not so surprising. We’d expect to see the largest number of them Monday. Unless major news breaks Sunday.
So let’s jump into them, shall we?
The Cleveland Plain Dealer continued its daily page topper that shows progress of the Apollo 11 spacecraft to the moon, 40 years ago:
If you’d like a larger (and readable!) view of just the topper, click on this one:
The Plain Dealer will be running this page topper and little diagram through the anniversary of the actual landing on Monday. We told you the story behind it yesterday.
The Houston Chronicle didn’t put its page one NASA story today into its centerpiece spot — that went to a picture of some dummy in police custody — but the story looks really cool:
The Chronicle’s Claudia Feldman spoke with “whiz kids” who worked in mission control during Apollo 11. Find that story here.
We’re seeing a lot of stories like this, in various papers. We hope someone is pulling these together into some kind of oral history.
The Daily Press of Newport News, Va., presented part two of its look at the role of the local Langley NASA center played in the push for the moon:
That’s a wonderful picture — and a rarely-seen one, too — of Neil Armstrong standing in front of a lunar module landing simulator at Langley. NASA’s online high-rez photo archives are extensive. So why do we see only the same four or five photos all the time? Great job, Daily Press.
And the article is great, as well. If you don’t know the story about how NASA made the decision about what method to use to go to the moon, read it here, by Cory Nealon of the Daily Press.
The Texarkana Gazette, too, ran the latest installment of a locally-written series:
Part five of ten covers the Gemini years of 1965 and 1966.
See that black reverse box at the bottom of the package? That’s a correction. It’s rare to find a correction so prominently displayed on the front.
It says:
Thursday’s story on NASA’s Mercury space program mistakenly said John Glenn was the first man to orbit Earth. It should have said he was the first American to orbit Earth. Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, did one orbit in the U.S.S.R.’s Vostok 1 on that historic journey. Then, about six month before Glenn went up, Gherman Titov, in the Vostok 2, made 17 orbits and was the first man to spend a full day in space.
Like we said yesterday, you can’t read the Gazette story online unless you subscribe.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch played the anniversary as lede art today, in the form of this Getty Images photo taken at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.:
The package cites events at a local aerospace museum and promos upcoming interviews with local folks in Sunday’s paper. Even Dan Martin’s popular A1 Weatherbird got in on the act:
USA Today tied the anniversary with a look at the future of NASA — an angle we expect to see a lot of in papers this Sunday — by using this iconic NASA photo of Buzz Aldrin’s bootprint in the lunar soil:
A number of papers led with stories about the newly restored video of the moonwalk. Probably the most effectively-designed package of this type was on the front of the Tuscaloosa News:
Not only is the photo used to good effect, but that headline — “Extreme makeover” — is terrific.
The Gazette of Charleston, W.Va. led page one with a side-by-side comparison of frames of the moonwalk videotapes:
Our only quibble: The thick black bar is awfully obtrusive. Better to crop each frame, put them into separate boxes and leave a white gutter between them.
At first glance, the Review-Journal of Las Vegas did the same thing. But wait — those aren’t the same frames, before-and-after remastering. They’re two completely different remastered screencaps:
Because the story is essentially a before-and-after story — the existing videotapes sucked, so NASA enlisted expert help from Hollywood to clean them up — we’d argue that running two frames, side-by-side was not the way to go today. We think just about any reader would expect two frames to show before-and-after. So run one like Charleston did or use only one like Tuscaloosa did.
In addition, we have a problem wity the headline. “One Giant Misstep for NASA” is clever and all, but the story today isn’t that NASA accidentally erased its best tapes of the moonwalk. That story has been out there for ages.
The story today was the restoration. Is the Review-Journal saying the high-definition restoration was a Giant Misstep?
We had a number of problems with the front of today’s Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal:
Let’s start with the secondary art. They chose two remastered video screencaps, just like Vegas did. In fact, they’re the same two screencaps Vegas used — they just ran them in a different order.
However, look closely at the captions:
The way they’re written, we think they imply that the photo on the left is a “before restoration” shot. The cap on the right is actually labeled as “refurbished.”
Perhaps we’re being too picky. But it’s definitely not clear.
An even bigger issue: To lede its pacakge, the Beacon Journal chose an iconic image that had nothing at all to do with the video story. Other than the fact that it, too, was taken on the moon that night in 1969.
We’re hoping to see newspapers curtail their use of this famous photo, which NASA has been handing out for ages (below, left). The reason: It’s been doctored. As you can see in the original unaltered frame — below, right — photographer Armstrong actually cut off the top few pixels of Aldrin’s space suit:
Read more about that famous photo here.
By the way — have you ever wondered why Buzz has his armed cocked in such a weird way? Is the doing a Napoleon Bonaparte imitation or something?
No, he’s simply reading his checklist, which is printed on his sleeve:
We’ll leave you today with something a little different.
Our pal Denise Covert of Florida Today writes:
For your apollo 11 blog consideration, here’s a cartoon by Florida Today’s awesome Jeff Parker, showing how it seems a lot harder to get to the moon today than 40 years ago:
Nicely done. Find Jeff’s cartoon blog here.
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Send us your interesting Apollo 11 pages. We’d love to post ‘em.
Earlier looks at Apollo 11 anniversary pages:
In case you haven’t seen them, go here to find NASA’s before-and-after video comparisons of the newly remastered videos. To learn more about why the original video was so bad in the first place, read this extensive PDF report. Read more about the accidental erasure of the original tapes here.
Here is NASA’s official Apollo 11 photo archive via its Manned Spaceflight office. Be aware, though, that many, many more photos than this exist in NASA’s archives. And navigating those things can be tricky.
You’ll find this Apollo archive much easier to pick through. It’s not an official NASA site, but the images are NASA images and, therefore, fair game to use.
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.
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.