Spacelog Apollo 8

You are looking through some haze on the windows too, unfortunately.

And the earth is very bright, besides.

Okay. We got the earth in about the center of the screen and a little bit low, and it looked like there were some objects that moved across it—the screen at the same time. Do you have any comment on those?

That is some of the water—ice coming off the vent nozzle.

Roger.

How does it look now?

Still the same thing; it is—the target is extremely bright, and it is very difficult to make out what we are looking at.

It is unfortunate that we do not have—we can't make the other lens work here. I don't know what the problem is.

Okay. Apollo 8, would you verify that the ALC is on?

We have tried it both ways.

Oh, okay; thank you. What we are getting now is a good picture.

Say again.

Okay. That's a—that's a real good picture. That is the best one that we have had. And how about going ahead and just leaving your pictures inside until we can think some more of what we can do to adjust for that light?

Roger. Jim, what are you doing here? Jim is fixing dessert. He is making up a bag of chocolate pudding. You can see it come floating by. Bill is coming up from the lower equipment bay. It is unfortunate that this telephoto lens. doesn't work. Show them the lens that's the culprit here, Jim. This lens doesn't seem to be working; I can't understand why we're not—perhaps it's a problem of light transmission through it.

This transmission is coming to you approximately halfway between the moon and the earth. We have been 31 hours and about 20 minutes into flight. We have about less than 40 hours to go to the moon. You can see that Bill has his toothbrush here. He has been brushing regularly. To demonstrate how things float around in zero g. It looks like he plays for the Astros, the way he tries to catch those things. I certainly wish that we could show you the earth. It is a beautiful, beautiful view, with predominately blue background and just huge covers of white clouds, particularly one very strong vortex up near the terminator. Very, very beautiful. Perhaps we will get some assistance from the people on the ground and be able to deter—to determine why this other lens is not transmitting properly.

Houston, did you get any light at all coming through that telephoto lens?

Apollo 8, we were getting what you were showing us on your normal lens, and I don't think we got anything on the telephoto. We are working on this now. One of the problems seems to be that it is a low light level lens; we're afraid that you might burn it out pointing it at something too bright.

Well, the earth is very, very bright. There is nothing in the lens you can burn out. The camera still seems to be working. We can give you a lumens reading of the earth right now if you like.