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"The Dish"
"Rick DeNatale" wrote in message news On Tue, 23 Dec 2003 15:17:32 +0000, Greg D. Moore (Strider) wrote: Yes. Specifically it's a fictionalized account of the activities at the radio dish in Australia that received the first images of Neil on the Moon. For the "historically accurate" account of Parkes observatory's role in Apollo 11 see http://www.parkes.atnf.csiro.au/apollo11/ (and being in Australia explains why the first images of Neil are upside down. :-) Nice joke, but in reality, the initial feed was alternating from the statins in Goldstone California and Honeysuckle Australia, both of which had neglected to correctly set the switch on their scan converters which would flip the image vertically, which was necessary because the camera was mounted upside down in the MESA. The image needed to be flipped again when Armstrong took the camera out and mounted it on a tripod on the lunar surface. The Parkes feed wasn't used until about nine minutes after the TV camera was switched on when it was realized that they had by far the best signal of the three ground stations receiving the transmission. Had Parkes been used from the beginning, we would never have seen the upside down image since they had the inversion switch correctly set. Following the release of The Dish, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) commissioned a great paper defining the reality of the Apollo 11 transmission receptions, On Eagle's Wings http://www.parkes.atnf.csiro.au/apollo11/. All of which goes to prove my thesis that the best thing about historical fiction is that it can garner interest in history (and those who criticise it as a historical document have made a mistake). Martin |
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