FILMING THE MOON

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 720, 20 July 1929, Page 27

FILMING THE MOON

DAWN COMES AT 5, MILES AN HOUR CAMERA AND TELESCOPE The first motion pictures of the moon have been taken at. Princeton University with a camera attached to the lens of a. 23m telescope. The lens, which is 2ft wide, becomes the lens of the camera. The film shows dawn creeping over the lunar landscape at nine miles an hour, the giant crater of Copernicus, with its walls two miles high, looming in the centre. 7 The sunrise is especially striking because there is no slow warning of the sun's rise such as we see on the earth. Brilliant sunlight contrasts vividly with dense shadows until the whole light illuminates the valleys and crevasses. . The audience see in a few minutes what an astronomer would take several hours to observe through a telescope. The pictures were taken at the rate of one every six seconds and show the sun rising a. hundred times faster than it really does. The film or Copernicus peak is 50R. long and contains 2,000 separate pictures.