Professionals from an elite New York college specially trained the Artemis II astronauts to take the out-of-this-world photographs that captivated and educated the globe.
Rochester Institute of Technology alums Katrina Willoughby and Paul Reichart were the flight operations imagery instructors for the round-the-moon mission, teaching two of the four Artemis II passengers how to snap critically important pics in the challenging, off-planet landscape.
“Most people can use a camera and get a photo that is good enough, but good enough isn’t what we’re after scientifically,” Willoughby, a 2004 graduate, told RIT’s newspaper.
“There are pictures we want to get, and then there are pictures that the team is depending on. The imagery is their data,” she added.
To secure this supremely important snaps, the RIT experts used a mock-up of the Orion spacecraft and a small, fake Moon to simulate the record-setting ride at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
“We hung a giant inflatable moon and hung it in the building and turned the lights out and we were taking real pictures,” Artemis II astronaut Victor Glover said in a NASA interview prior to launch which was posted on X.
After the rehearsals, Glover said he had a profound realization about the 45-minute stretch when Artemis II would be closest to the lunar surface.
“I walked out into the parking lot and it hit me while I was walking toward my car…Those moments may change what we know about the Moon, what we know about our Earth, what we know about the Solar System and the Universe,” Glover said in the interview.
“After that day [of photo training] I stared at the moon differently,” he said.
On top of the educational value of the high-resolution photographs of the lunar surface, the starskimmers hope the photos will inspire the next generation of astronauts.
“It’s the creative side. It’s telling a story. It’s making sure that the photos you take share the awe and the grandeur,” astronaut Christina Koch said in the interview.
“And focus on the little things that you may not expect. Some of my favorite pictures from space have been of things like cloud tops. Things you just had no idea were as beautiful from above as they are below,” she reflected.
The camera the NASA astronauts used was an old-model Nikon which can be bought here on Earth for about $1,000.
The space agency employed Nikon D5 DSLR — a classic digital single-lens-reflex camera first released in 2016 — which was selected because of its proven track record as a workhorse space snapper.
