Spacelog Apollo 8

Go ahead, Apollo 8.

Roger. With the delay in burn, do you mind if we have a urine dump the—before the burn? Will that foul your tracking up?

Okay. Stand by. Let me run that one by.

Okay, Apollo 8. It's a little bit early to give you any real numbers on your COMM performance. Looks like it's working as good as predicted, and everything else seems to be doing better, so this may be doing better, too, after we have done our next COMM checks some of these other things will have a better hack on; I can give you a quantitative answer to your question.

Houston, Apollo 8. How do you read?

Loud and clear, Apollo 8.

Roger. Sure got a nice view of the earth from here. We can see Baja California and about where San Diego ought to be.

Very good.

I can't see my dad's flagpole out there today, though.

Apollo 8, Houston.

Go ahead, Houston.

Okay. We dropped off of high gain on the OMNI there for a bit and went to a low bit rate, and we're getting ready to command you back to a high bit rate. Do you want us to keep you posted every time we change tape speeds?

We're not recording now anyway, Houston.

Roger. Understand; but when we go to high bit rate, do you want to be kept informed every time we transfer? We hadn't planned on it.

If we think it we need the recorder, we'll ask you on that deal.

Apollo 8.

Go ahead.

Roger. How does your tracking look on us?

Fido, FLIGHT.

Apollo 8, tracking still in progress and a little too soon to give you a firm answer on the results, but everything looks nominal so far.

Is it working okay?

Seems to be.

Apollo 8.

Go ahead.

Okay. Sometime when it's convenient for you now, I would like to see an oxygen fuel cell purge. And do you have any estimate on when you might be getting around to this COMM test?

Right now we're right in the middle of trying to get something to eat, Ken. We can—I guess we can do the fuel cell purge.

Apollo 8, there's no rush. Just didn't know what you were doing at the time and—Give us a call when you have a free moment; we'll pick up.

We can start the O₂ purge now, if you wish.

Okay. That'd be fine, and I'll keep track of the time for you.

Okay. That'd be good. Now I'll turn on O₂ now on fuel cell 1.

Apollo 8, Houston. That's about 2 minutes on your first fuel cell.

Roger. It's up, and number 2 is on now.

Roger.

Houston, Apollo 8.

Houston. Go ahead.

While I'm waiting for my turn at the water gun, I might give some comments on the optics. There seems to be quite a band of light that goes all way across the scanning telescope anywhere in the vicinity of the sun. Just a little while ago we were in the position where I could pick up the moon in the scanning telescope. And then I looked at it in the sextant and the sky—the space around the moon was a very light blue, just about as light blue as we have it back on earth. And it's not black—that sun angle with the moon.

Understand. This light blue was—showed up in the sextant.

That's affirmative. I maneuvered the optics so I could pick up the moon in the sextant, and the—the space around the moon is light blue.

Roger. Can you make any kind of estimate about the proportion of the radius, how far out that seems to extend?

Well, it extends the full length of the sextant. Actually, I could see us coming as we moved across, because the band of light in the scanning telescope cut across where the moon was, and it moved in this area. I believe it's caused by the refractional light inside the optics themselves.

Roger.

Also, I've been occasionally looking out to see if I could see stars at various sun angles, and at this particular altitude, it's very difficult. In the scanning telescope the sun is very bright and the earth is very bright, And if I looked at the earth and try to look for stars, I lose my dark adaptation very quickly.