Apollo 11 Lands On the Moon

The 16-minute video above is provided through the courtesy of Apollo-11.tv. To enjoy it fully, use the "full-screen" option in the lower right-hand corner of the embedded video player.

The video shown above is one chapter of a free 3-1/2 hour documentary titled "Moonscape" which provides a restored and enhanced version of the entire Apollo-11 moonwalk as broadcast in 1969. To see examples of the restoration work performed by the Moonscape team, see https://apollo-11.tv/Moonscape-restoration-demos

To the best of my knowledge when Moonscape was first released, the Contact Light chapter is the first documentary to show this Mission Control footage with synchronized sound in such detail and in real-time, as it happened.

The entire effort of the documentary was performed by and funded by an international group of space enthusiasts based in Italy as a labor of love. The final documentary was released as an open-source film.  Bill Anderton was on the US distribution team and performed the Adaptive Steaming encodement in HLS and hosted the media on his global content delivery platform. The 16-mm motion picture file shown above was professionally remastered and enhanced with the addition of the Mission Control audio loops and captioning. In the upper right-hand corner is a display of mission elapsed time and the altitude and speed of the LM as it descends.

The video presented above is from the 16-mm data acquisition camera which was mounted in astronaut Buzz Aldrin's window on the left side of the LM and provided an excellent view. The 16mm data acquisition camera (DAC) was a purpose-built camera made by Maurer. The camera was used primarily to record engineering data and for continuous-sequence terrain photography. Apollo 11 carried two of these cameras, one on the CM and one on the LM. The CM camera had lenses of 5-mm, 10-mm, and 75-mm focal lengths; the LM camera was fitted with an 18-mm wide-angle lens. Accessories included a right-angle mirror, a power cable, and a CM boresight window bracket. To record the powered descent phase of the LM and the Moon landing itself, the camera was set to record 6 frames per second. Since this was film, these images were NOT seen live on Earth during the lunar descent. Instead, the Earth audience didn't see these images until the film was returned and processed.