I'm in the process of writing up a review for the Philippe Lheureux book and I've got a question about the cameras.

In his book he asks the question who could have taken this photo. He say it must be a fake, because it is clearly not a Hassalblad photo. Obviously no effort was made to research this topic.


My question is this, what is the size of the Hassalblad negative and what is the size of the DAC negative? I want to get it right. These HBs are always looking for the smallest thing to cut you down.

I love that. It's not a Hasselblad photo, because it's a frame from the DAC.

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Hmmm... Didn't the Hasselblad use 70mm film, while the DAC used 16 mm?...

By the way, I think the Hasselblad used color reversal film, so it would be a positive, not a negative...

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The Hasselblad 70mm longroll format is 70mm strip width, with an image size of 60-65 millimeters, depending on the gate. I've heard people describe the Apollo image size as 55 millimeters, but I've personally never seen a Hasselblad take an image that small. I'd go with the 60-65mm frame size (square).

Asking about 16mm motion picture filmstock will elicit groans from anybody who's ever used it. Every camera maker is different. Some have no peforations, and others were either singly or doubly perforated. In any case, 16mm always refers to the strip width. The frame format inside of that is anyone's guess. The width could vary from 10 to 15.5 millimeters.

Seriously, anyone unable to distinguish 16mm from 70mm photography, and unaware that 16mm sequence photography was even done, has no business claiming expertise on the Apollo record.

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

Jay, on Clavius, you say, "We turn to Michael Light's excellent book Full Moon. Light claims to have preserved the entire transparency frame in his prints. So we can measure where he thinks his idea of the frame edge lies. It turns out that the edges of all his photos are 2.59 fiducials away from the center."

The fiducials are 1 cm apart. Wouldn't that make the image width 51.8 mm?

You need to save that quote and put it on your website.

The fiducials are 1 cm apart. Wouldn't that make the image width 51.8 mm?

Yes, but I have reason to question some of those measurements since I wrote that page.

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Clavius Moon Base

What's this? Doubt Clavius?

The Reseau plate in this photo seems to suggest that your 2.59 cm is not too far off the mark. I don't see a third fiducial from center, which suggests the gate was less than 60 mm wide, but perhaps it just barely was:

http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/Hi.../a11-hass3.jpg

Or do you have measurements from the photos you took in the desert, in which case this is all idle guesswork on my part?

As for 16 mm, I suspect the Apollo film image corresponds to your 10 mm figure. The two common 16 mm camera film formats were 16 (double perf) and Super-16 (single perf). Super-16 was introduced in the 1970s (1971 is earliest date I could find). The NASA films all have a 4:3 aspect ratio too, so they most likely are regular 16 with the 10 mm frame width.

The Hasselblads took 70mm double exposure 'negatives'.

Well, the 70mm weren't "negatives" they were "transparencies" or positive images, like slides. And the strip of polyester was 70mm wide, but the image is narrower than the film. That's sort of the question we're trying to answer with the motion picture film. The latter sounds like a Mark Gray question.

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Clavius Moon Base

Joe dropped me an email about this thread and I'm happy to supply the following information.

I measured the film gate of a standard Hasselblad A12 film back. It measures 55mm in both directions. I don't have a 70mm back but I suspect based on the camera design that it too will be 55mm square.

The maximum image size the camera body could allow would be 59mm.

Thanks, Craig.

We always counted on Craig to measure film gates and the like for us, even for oddball cameras. We won't make you buy a 70 mm back, though. I think the 55 mm x 55 mm figure is close enough for Apollo images until somebody can measure a Hasselblad with a Reseau plate, or, God willing, one of us gets to view the holy originals themselves.