APOLLO 17 MISSION PHOTOGRAPHY OVERVIEW
The photographic objectives of the Apollo 17 mission were to provide precisely oriented mapping camera photographs and high-resolution panoramic camera photographs of the lunar surface, to support a wide variety of scientific and operational experiments, and to document operational tasks on the lunar surface and in flight.
Apollo 17 Photography
Summary
For the first time in an Apollo mission, the Antarctic continent was visible to and photographed by the orbiting astronauts. A spectacular group of 70-millimeter Hasselblad EL color photographs exposed in Earth orbit portrayed the sunlit portion of the Earth from the South Atlantic Ocean across Africa and the Indian Ocean to Australia. A portion of the lunar farside that had not been illuminated during the other J-series missions (Apollo 15 and 16) was in sunlight during the early revolution of the Apollo 17 spacecraft. The panoramic and mapping cameras were used to photograph a part of this area. In the panoramic camera, 1623 images were exposed, of which approximately 1580 were high-resolution photographs from lunar orbit. Of the 3298 mapping camera frames, approximately 2350 contain imagery of the lunar suface. A total of 1170 Hasselblad EL photographs were exposed from the command module (CM) and 2422 Hasselblad data camera (DC) photographs were exposed from the lunar module (LM) or -- the case for the majority of the photos -- on the lunar surface. Almost 380 Nikon 35-millimeter frames were exposed. Of the 12 magazines of 16-millimeter film exposed, four were used inside the LM and eight in the CM. Virtually for the first time on an Apollo mission, earthshine photographs provided usable imagery, including that of lunar surface areas where the crew reported seeing possible "flashes." Crew-option photographs included the "flash" areas, lunar surface color boundaries, areas with orange-colored strata, flows, and other features of geologic interest.
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