NASA-UAP-D015_Astronaut-Scientific-Debriefings_1962-1963.pdf

Miss Reeves
x20593

draft

... a little bit, my skin was wet and it didn't stick the way it had stuck
when we tried it out in the trainer and in the capsule on the pad and I finally
gave up on it and just kept one eye shut. This is marginally satisfactory, I
guess, but I was not well nighted after coming up to the first night. There's
a redundancy here but you sure do have the right information or cases so a
few of these will be repeats. Now let's start out with the conditions of
dark adaptation.

Well, most of these things that we had planned to look into if we could
on Astronomy sort of went by the board, and I…

2

degree of adaptation out of. I could notice a difference in the numbers of stars I could see at first going in after the sun first went down and later on then when I'd be well night adapted (at the end of the period.) This is some 37 minutes later when you're approaching sunrise so you'd have a -- I suppose there was a actual period there where you're really dark adapting of about a half hour, 33 minutes, something of that order.

Did you have an opportunity to count the stars?

No, this is one of those things that went down the drain. I thought about this on a subsequent orbit but I didn't…

3

stars. But a general impression of looking out at these areas was that the numbers of stars I could see was not greatly increased.

You mention the transmission through the glass be comparable ... to the atmosphere. That's something you people can check?

That's right.

McDonald, through their studies of the window had felt that we probably would not see too many more stars because the transmission of light through the window is cut down by 27 per cent or something like that. The figure that they came up with was almost identical to what people have computed the atmospheric attenuation of l…

4

Was this bothered or being bothered by moonlight on the windows or was the sky actually bright?

No. The sky was not bright. I didn't notice the sky being bright at all nor was it moonlight bothering on the window of the capsule. It was moonlight on the surface of the earth back from the clouds when I looked down that direction I could use as a Yaw reference.

Yes, but I heard you say that the moonlight very definitely did bother your ability to see faint areas. I'm trying to find out in what way.

Well I don't--perhaps that was a misstatement. I don't think it really hurt on seeing fainter…

5

This didn't seem to be any problem. Looking up fairly close to the moon, I would guess a--counting a number degrees probably, you could see right up to the edge of the moon. The stars would be visible right up--very close, it's not like it is when- [you observe the moon from the earth's surface]

Fairy faint stars?

Yes, I think so, just like the other--the whole field of stars you're looking at, you come up and--the only way, when you swing the capsule around and you'd be approaching area where the moon was, you could tell it because there would be moonlight coming in the window and you wo…

6

this was very similar. You do the same thing there and I had no--there was no problem with the eyes. The light though, it was very noticeable. The light was a very brilliant clear, white light and what it looked like coming in the window and the way it looked on the suit--the best thing I could relate it to were the arc lights, the brilliant search light arc lights that they have down at the Cape that are out on the pad at night. Its that type brilliant white light coming in--very bright. And it was warm enough that I remember commenting, I put it on the tape I believe at one time that ridi…

7

from there on. That's what I was prepared to see, I guess, but this wasn't the way it was at all. The sun goes down and it's a brilliant display. There's all the spectrum lined up here almost. Just as the sun goes down--well before the sun goes down you have a broad band ... down in the atmosphere that we show on the pictures that I took too and I'm sorry we don't have those there to brief you with those but you'll see those later where starting with the sun down on the horizon there a great band that runs way out here maybe I think I estimated some 45 to 60 degrees on each side of the sun,…