A man told me once that the cam­era used in the moon by the Apollo 11 team was a Nikon, it was back in the days of the dawn on the Internet, when com­put­ers, cell­phone and web­sites were yet to be ubiq­ui­tous, for a few years, I was made believe that Nikon was indeed the moon camera.

Boy, that man and I got the fact wrong.

It was until I was seri­ously learn­ing pho­tog­ra­phy that I got my hands on a UK based photo pub­li­ca­tion ‘Practical Photography’—which was my favorite photo mag­a­zine that time—when it fea­tured an Apollo spe­cial issue to com­mem­o­rate the man’s first moon land­ing and moon walk that I learned, it was actu­ally a spe­cially engi­neered Hasselblad medium for­mat cam­eras that made it to the moon with the Apollo 11 team, they had 4 70mm Hasselblad 500 EL onboard includ­ing the backup cam­eras to cap­ture the images of the orbit, the atmos­phere and the moon itself.

There were tech­ni­cal & log­i­cal rea­sons for choos­ing a Hasselblad:

- They needed a cam­era body large enough to fit the custom-sized but­tons for the crews to oper­ate (they wear large gloves)
– They needed a high res­o­lu­tion cam­era and the compact-sized Hasselblad medium for­mat was a log­i­cal choice for their sharp lenses & reliability

Here’s what Hasselblad had to say about it:

Simply put, NASA chose Hasselblad to go into space because we had the best cam­eras on earth. A claim that we are still proud to make today, forty years later.

The Hasselblad 500 EL was based on the acclaimed 500 series cam­era, mod­i­fied with elec­tron­ics, custom-sized but­ton as well as space friendly body, the cam­era would cap­ture his­toric images for the mankind’s most impor­tant achievement.

Record has it that they cap­tured a total of 1407 expo­sures; 857 black & white and 550 on color film, and my curios­ity was set to find out where to find these images, thanks to google, the Lunar & Planetary Institute hosted these images under the Apollo Image Atlas Gallery. It doesn’t stop there. High-resolution images are avail­able for down­load too, how awesome!

Head over to the 70mm Hasselblad Image Catalog (Apollo 11), or the Hasselblad in space web fea­ture from the cam­era­maker, or see the now retired space cam­era from the col­lect space dis­cus­sion forum.

Looking for­ward the upcom­ing new race to the moon!

update:

The Boston Globe fea­tured some awe­some images on the Big Picture Gallery, and the NYTimes have some reader’s mem­ory fea­ture, finally The Apollo Archive has a ded­i­cated col­lec­tion of all Apollo mis­sion images. (via kottke.org)