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| ||||| Monday, March 04, 2002 - 10:13 am I was watching some clips on Nasa TV from the first EVA of the current mission and noticed that many parts of them were completely black! I assume the shuttle was in the earth shadow just then and then a thought struck me. Don't the astronauts have some kind of spotlight to turn on when they are in the shadow? One thinks it might be nice to actually be able to see what you are doing up there. Maybe they DO have enough light up there for the astronaut to do the work, but not enough for the helmet camera to give a nice picture? Don't most normal camcorders these days have some kind of night vision feature using a simple IR diode to light up the environment? Those camcorder's light sensors don't seem to have any problem picking that light up and converting it to a black & white picture. Why isn't this technology implemented in the helmet cams? It would be nice to see pictures on Nasa TV that aren't completely black, but most importantly one thinks that the guys in Houston might want to be able to see what's going on up there as well. Does anybody explain this? | |
| ||||| Monday, March 04, 2002 - 10:21 am I noticed the same thing -- some of the footage is very dark, and some of it is quite overexposed. I don't know why. I do know the astronauts have work lights -- there's one on each side of the helmet. | |
| ||||| Monday, March 04, 2002 - 02:04 pm good question. try asking the folks at: http://spaceflight.nasa.gov | |
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