Spacelog Apollo 11

Oops! Spoke too soon.

I'm making myself seasick doing it, Charlie. I'll just put you back rightside-up where you belong.

Roger.

You don't get to do that every day.

11, Houston. Could you describe, from your view, the polar cloudcap? It appears to us to extend down the western coast of North America. Would you estimate how far it extends down? Over.

Trying to fit everybody into the window.

It appears that the cloudcap comes down a little bit below the southern extremity of Alaska.

Roger.

We've—11, we've lost our picture here, now.

Okay. Apollo 11, Houston. We've got the picture back now.

Unfortunately, we only have one window that has a view of the Earth and it's filled up with the TV camera, so your view now is probably better than ours is.

Roger. We copy.

11, Houston. If you could comply, we'd like to see a little smiling faces up there, if you could give us some interior views. I'm sure everybody would like to see you. Over.

Okay. We'll reconfigure the TV for that.

Roger.

Apollo 11, Houston. It appears to us that we're seeing a view from outside plus a little of the inside. It appears you've taken the camera away from the left window now. Over.

That's correct. We're moving it back and reconfiguring for interior lighting.

Roger.

We can still see the Earth through the left window, and it appears that we can see a floodlight off to the left, either that or some Sun shafting through the hatch window.

It's a floodlight.

Roger.

Now we're coming in. Can't quite make out who that …

That's big Mike Collins, there —

You got a little bit of—Yes, hello there sports fans. You got a little bit of me, plus Neil is in the center couch, and Buzz is doing the camera work at this time.

Roger. It's a little dark now, 11. Maybe a bigger f-stop might help.

Yes, that's in work.

It's getting a lot better now, 11. Mike, you're coming in five-by. I got a good -

I would have put on a coat and tie if I'd known about this ahead of time.

Is Buzz holding your cue cards for you. Over.

Cue cards have a no. We have no intertions of competing with the professionals, believe me. We are very comfortable up here, though. We do have a happy home. There's plenty of room for the three of us and I think we're all learning to find our favorite little corner to sit in. Zero g is very comfortable, but after a while you get to the point where you sort of get tired of rattling around and banging off the ceiling and the floor and the side, so you tend to find a little corner somewhere and put your knees up or something like that to wedge yourself in, and that seems more at home.

Roger. Looks like Neil is coming in five-by there, 11. Mike, see you in the background. The definition is really outstanding. The colors are good. It's a real good picture we're getting here of Commander Armstrong. We—Buzz, when you take the camera over towards the window where the Sun's shafting through, it tends to blank it out, though.

Yes, Neil's standing on his head again. He's trying to make me nervous.

Roger.

He's disappearing up into the tunnel, of course, as he would going into the lunar module, only backwards.

Roger. We 'can see portions of the LEB now. The systems test meter panel, in the lower part of the picture, or we did have it, anyway.

Okay. And directly behind his head are our optical instruments, the sextant and the telescope that we use to take sightings with.

Roger. Copy. And we see the DSKY flashing with a 651. In fact, we can read registers 1 and 2 quite clearly.

We have the old high gain angles telling us which way the Earth is.

Copy. That's a beautiful picture. Clarity is outstanding.

We can also give you the time of day in our system of mission elapsed time. Elapsed time: 34 hours 16 minutes and umpteen seconds. Can you see that clearly enough, Charlie?

Roger, Apollo 11. We can see it counting up every—every second. We got 34 17 02 now.

Okay. Back to the high-gain angles.

Roger.

Now we have amputated those.

Yes. Those are Buzz's two star charts that he is using right now as sun shades over the righthand window, window number 5.

Roger. We see the sun shining in through it behind him and plotting out the equatorial—correction, ecliptic plane, and the stars that you're using for the navigation.

Roger. He doesn't really need the charts. He's got them memorized. They're just for show.

We copy.

While we're pointing up in this direction, we see out our side windows the Sun going by and, of course, out one of our windows right now we've got the Earth. Now right behind my window, of course, we have the Sun, because the Sun is illuminating the star charts that we see. This line represents the ecliptic plane and these lines, vertical lines, represent our reference system that the spacecraft is using at this time. As we approach the Moon, the Moon will gradually grow larger and larger in size and eventually it will be in—it will be eclipsing the Sun as we go behind it, as we approach the lunar orbit insertion maneuver.