Astronauts, Artists Agree: Moon Stinks of Gunpowder

AOL News ^ | Thursday, October 21, 2010 | Lee Speigel

[SunkenCiv]

You can't breathe on the moon, but now you can smell it.

A Scottish printmaker has released a series of works that publicize a fact known to astronauts for decades: The moon smells like gunpowder.

Apprentice printer Sue Corke worked with flavorist Steven Pearce of Omega Ingredients and Apollo 16 astronaut Charles M. Duke Jr. to create "scratch-and-sniff" moon prints.

NASA has known since the 1970s about the gunpowder-like odor of Earth's natural satellite.

Even though there's no air on the moon, one moonwalker, Apollo 14 lunar module pilot Edgar D. Mitchell, confirmed to AOL News that the moon smells like gunpowder, possibly because of the composition of basalt rock from ancient lava flows on the side of the moon that always faces Earth...

Mitchell said that the rocks he and his two moon co-voyagers -- Alan B. Shepard Jr. and Stuart A. Roosa -- lugged back to Earth after their 1971 flight "went into the quarantine facility at Houston, but that doesn't mean we didn't get to smell it and talk about it. It's been handled and tested by geologists, and we smelled it in the spacecraft after we got it on board."

...And how does ex-moonwalker Mitchell feel about the idea of scratch-and-sniff moon prints?

"Well, that's ingenuity."

[rwoodward]

There is no atmosphere on the moon. Stars are not visible without an atmosphere.

[SatinDoll]

Try taking a picture of someone outside at night. If you can photograph someone clearly, stars shouldn’t appear unless you have it set for a long exposure. The light from stars is very faint.

[dr_lew]

Lunar daytime is quite different than terrestrial daytime since the sky is still perfectly dark. You could take pictures of the stars during lunar daytime by shielding the lens with a simple baffle.

However, when you expose for the brightly light ground and the objects on it, the exposure value is too low to show the stars. It’s analagous to taking a picture in a brightly lit stadium at night on the earth.

[Deaf Smith]

Is it a IMR 4064 type of smell or more like a Herco/Bullseye type of smell?

[KarlInOhio]

why are there no stars showing in that pic ...over the horizon....?

Stars are dim and the moon in full sunlight is bright. An aperture and shutter speed which allow the astronaut to be seen as anything other than a pure white blur means that not enough starlight is coming in to expose the film.

Notice the very deep depth of field in the picture. That means the aperture is very small, so less light is getting to the film.

Even from earth a shot showing both the stars and the moon is usually a double exposure because it is very difficult to shoot both.

[Rebelbase]

You’re the one that brought it up:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mouUUWpEec0

[Revolting cat!]

You’ve got to remember that the fake moon landing was shot in the same Burbank studio where all the Keystone Kops and other silents were filmed. There was a lot of shooting (with blanks of course, but still) in those movies and the odor remained for decades on the sound stages, which were not well ventilated to isolate them from the noisy surroundings.

[SunkenCiv]

;’)

[SunkenCiv]

Oops, dammit, we need more Calgon.

[Defiant]

It’s all those bottle rockets I shot as a kid.

[Redcitizen]

IS that ball or stick gunpowder?

[SunkenCiv]

Why The Apollo Moon Pictures Have No Stars
http://www.skywise711.com/Skeptic/MoonPics/MoonPics.html

sidebar:

Alan Bean Gallery
http://www.alanbeangallery.com/

[SunkenCiv]

:’D

[dr_lew]

The MoonPics chart makes the point, but I would note that I used to expose the night sky on TRI-X 400 film for 1/4 second with an f/4 135 mm lens, and I'd get a lot of stars showing short trails, if you examined the negative closely.

I think at f/4 you'd need about 1/2000 of a second exposure for a daylight scene. This doesn't quite square with the 1/500 sec for daylight and 10 seconds to barely show a fuzzy venus in the chart, as a factor of 4 would bring you to 1 second for a star field. It's not realy so far off, though. Maybe the difference is the lower resolution of the lens. ( The star trail width was much larger than the grain of the TRI-X, though. )

I ought to get a digital SLR, but a while ago I sprang for an ORION STARSHOOT instead. It's kind of a disappointment, to be honest. The only thing I've had any luck with is the moon, but I don't really have the right setup for it, to be fair.