"We should have had a historian running around saying 'I don't care if you are ever going to use them -- we are going to keep them'." - Richard Nafzger, an engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

In 2006, NASA admitted that they had magnetically erased tapes with the original video footage of the 1969 landing on the moon - to re-use and save money (luckily they found good copies in the archives of CBS news). After I read that article, I started looking into the depths of the photographic archive to see what they had held on to - and what I could possibly recover.

The Apollo Lunar Surface Close-up Camera (a stereo-macro camera), known officially as the ALSCC; was used on the moon by Neil Armstrong, Alan Bean, and Alan Shepard during the Apollo Missions 11, 12, and 14 (1969 - 1971). The slide pairs, originally taken on SO-168 Ektachrome 70 mm, high-speed color reversal film, ASA 160; were meant to be viewed through a stereo viewer in order to observe the three dimensionality of the lunar surface geology.

 



Each image represents approximately 7 x 8 centimeters or 2.8 x 3.2 inches of the lunar surface.
NASA/JSC/ASU

There is a deep moonquake every 27 days, roughly the same amount of time that it takes the moon to orbit the Earth. These lunar tremors were first felt and recorded by the Apollo 11 mission astronauts in 1969. In the two hours and fourteen minutes that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin spent on the moon, they collected rocks, recorded samples of the regolith (lunar soil), and planted a seismometer. In the following missions to the moon, more seismometers were planted, and data recorded for a total of eight years. This data was recently re-analysed using an algorithm-based program to uncover hundreds of previously unknown tremors, revealing this monthly pattern.

Using the LSCC (Lunar Surface Close-up Camera), stereo images of the lunar regolith were collected by the astronauts. I assembled all the RAW data from the 35 mm stereo scans held in the archive and combined the frames into animated GIFs to resurrect the 3D effect. These assembled archival images, when viewed in this format, help to illustrate the concept of an actual moonquake, and also to prompt empathy for the monthly impact on our celestial neighbour.