Well, I was wrong about that.
In the last video I was looking at why although we now have modern sophisticated digital video cameras, we don’t see close-up launch footage from the likes of Artemis and SpaceX that matched the quality of the old Apollo and Shuttle film footage and that wasn’t overexposed and washed out.
Well, it seems NASA do still use high-speed film to record engineering footage, they did with the Artemis 1 launch as well as digital cameras, they don’t seem to release it for public viewing though.
But thanks to one avid space watcher, Go4Gordon on Twitter, who filed a freedom of information request to release the footage, a few weeks ago in April NASA did just that and put the high-speed film footage on their images public site.
I would also like to thank one of my long-time viewers, Greg for bringing this to my attention. I have put the links to the images pages on NASA’s website in the description so you can download film footage of the Artemis launch, just make sure you click the download link button to get the full files.
There are 6 video files which are large at up to a couple of gigabytes each and cover about 8-1/2 hours in total. They are in slow motion, shot at 400 and 120 frames per second so unless you speed them up they will take a long time to watch for a few minutes of the real-time footage, they are engineering films after all. There are also lots of different shots from the many cameras around the pad and site.
If you want to see a shortened edited highlights version just continue to watch the rest of this video which is just over 7 minutes long, I have sped the footage up a bit but it is still in slo-mo for the best effect.
As there is no sound recorded with footage you can enjoy Mars from Holst’s Planet suit or blast out your favourite rocket launch audio, either way I hope you enjoy it, oh and by the way the last shot is meant to look like that to make the maximum use of the 16:9 format and watch out for the shockwaves in the first couple of seconds after launch.
