Earliest images of the moon were better than people realised
I wish the article got into more of the technical details behind how this actually worked. I find it absolutely jaw-droopingly incredible that they were able to shoot gigabytes of essentially IMAX-quality negatives, develop them in flight (which requires temperatures of around 20ºC for all of the materials involved—Edit: they didn't do this because it would've been too difficult, and ended up using a mostly dry development process. See <i>Edit</i> link), scan them(!!!), and then radio them back to the earth. I would find this amazing today, and all of this happened in the 1960s!<p><i>Edit</i> here's a little more information: <a href="http://www.moonviews.com/2012/06/lunar-orbiters-classified-heritage.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.moonviews.com/2012/06/lunar-orbiters-classified-h...</a>, and the link from there to <a href="http://www.nro.gov/history/csnr/programs/docs/prog-hist-01.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.nro.gov/history/csnr/programs/docs/prog-hist-01.p...</a> contains the technical details on the camera I was after. Amazing stuff.