Television formats. Ugh. NTSC. PAL. SECAM. 720p. 1080i. It's a nightmare, but let me add one more - purely for the television nerd in you and for posterity: SSTV or Slow-scan Television. No reason for you to take notes or reconfigure your render engine to accommodate the format however, because it's an ex-format (for most of us) that was used to transmit pictures over radio frequencies, like RKO Radio Pictures. Actually, "radio pictures" is not as strange as it sounds, since television is merely a radio signal. Why discuss a dead format on a cutting edge video site like Videopia? Simple: I was looking for an excuse to publish something about the 40th Anniversary of the Moon Landing, an event which I personally feel is as important as the day the Great Pyramid was completed. Either way, billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of humans were involved in a staggeringly monumental effort we moderns have been entirely unable to duplicate.

It's probably hard for a modern audience to understand how we could put a man (or men) on the moon and still shoot such crappy video. Granted, we know Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had better things to do than make home movies, like, for example, not crash into a crater or get back home, but still: Why are those moon landing videos so crappy? Well, the partial answer is that the original video tapes were lost when some budget-conscious person recorded over them. The other reason is SSTV. Oh, and the fact that it's LIVE video... from the FREAKIN' MOON!

Old and dead NTSC television ("old and dead" for about a month now) operated with a bandwidth of 6 Mhz or 6,000 kHz. The wider the bandwidth, the more information you can transmit, so I think you'll find it unsurprising to learn that the quality of the video on SSTV was not very good when the bandwidth was only 3 kHz. Or maybe you'll find it surprising we got any sort of picture at all. Look at those numbers again: NTSC Color TV bandwidth = 6,000 kHz, SSTV from the Moon = 3 kHz. Yikes!

The SSTV system used in NASA's early Apollo missions transferred ten black and white frames per second (10 fps), with a resolution of 320 lines, compared with NTSC's 30 fps, 525 lines and color. And, again, you have to consider that Cmd. Armstrong turned on the camera himself as he went down the ladder, so it's amazing we got any pictures at all. Still, the LIVE video is amazing, complimenting the 16mm motion picture film and 70mm stills, too. If only the Egyptians had been so lucky.