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Friday, June 2, 2017

LO-1 Earthrise, 23 Aug 1966 - Celestia recreation

I found some neat information about one of the more famous Earthrise images the other day, the First Earth-Moon image taken by the Lunar Orbiter 1 (which was recovered from old tapes by the LOIRP).

In that data was an analysis of when and where the image was taken of frame 1102:


Since this gives a lot of detail about the image I decided to try to recreate it in Celestia

My first attempt failed, the images didn't match (it was close but not close enough) so I had to do some more research.  What I found was this data sheet contains a slight omission of a negative sign for the Lunar Latitude latitude of the spacecraft!

This page details the Spacecraft Position as:
  Altitude: 1198.22 km
  Latitude: -9.76°
  Longitude: 150.37°

So using those values we immediately get good agreement with the data -- from an open source program that is built on the heliocentric model...


I think that's pretty neat -- not only did we find a good match with the image but we found an error in the data because the data given did NOT match.


Sorry, I don't have high-resolution images loaded for my Celestia moon.

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