The Search Is on for Original Apollo 11 Footage:
Almost everyone on the planet who had access to television watched the first moon landing, back on the night of July 20, 1969. What the TV viewers didn’t know is that they weren’t seeing the best images.The astronauts actually beamed higher-quality footage back to Earth, but it was only seen by a small number of people at three tracking stations.
Those original images were recorded and put into storage — somewhere. Now, a small crew of retirees, space enthusiasts, and NASA employees are searching for a moon landing that the world has never seen.
How did they convert the high-quality image to a TV-ready image?
To convert the originals, engineers essentially took a commercial television camera and aimed it at the monitor. The resulting image is what was sent to Houston, and on to the world.