Retro: Seen from the Ground: The Color of Discovery's Meatball

[ralfvandebergh]

As an astrophotographer, I was privileged to capture some Space Shuttle flights since 2007, I just switched from planetary imaging to spaceflight imaging a year earlier. Most of the times when there was a sighting opportunity, you saw the shuttle in 'docked to the ISS' condition as the docked time was also the longest time of the shuttle in orbit. However, if you were lucky, you could see the orbiter in solo flight, on its way to the ISS or on the way back home. These were the most interesting opportunities as you really could get a 'clear' view of the orbiter and have a chance to look inside the open payload bay (as the shuttle flew with payload bay pointed to Earth).

Smaller details were also possible in great conditions. The NASA logo for example, when conditions were good, offered not really a problem to capture it on the wing - sometimes, when resolution was a bit lower, it looked like an element that was stuck to the left edge of the opened payload bay door from that distance/resolution. But a real challenge was to capture the typical blue color of the logo - called 'the meatball' in NASA terms. Landscape photographers will know how difficult it is to photograph subtle colors of small objects over extreme large distances due to haze and atmosphere. In this STS-131 video from the ISS you see that the color is even difficult to see from a distance in space without any atmosphere in between:  https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/a/ab/STS-131_ISS_flyaround.ogv/STS-131_ISS_flyaround.ogv.360p.webm

Recently, I enhanced images I took of Discovery on STS-131 from the Netherlands. (the bottom image set). If you look closely, you can see that the typical color of the logo only appears exactly on that spot were the logo is. Realize that images were taken with very simple equipment: a 10 inch F/4.5 mirror telescope and an ordinary JVC videocamera taped to the eyepiece with some zoom capabilities. And not unimportant: the tracking was done fully manually, which means pointing at the shuttle with finderscope at low magnification and crosshairs.

For the naked eye and as seen through the tracking scope, most of the times the shuttle looked like an ordinary satellite. It was not particularly bright, like the ISS, sometimes even generally bright depending on the pass across the sky. If you didn't know, you wouldn't have been able to distinguish it from other satellites and tell that it's a Space Shuttle. An amazing and Surreal experience.

The Discovery was coming back from the ISS, and there just was a night with great steady atmospheric conditions which could possibly have been under positive influence of the suspended air traffic due to the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano just a short time before, or even might had a positive influence due to the dust from that volcano in the atmosphere itself. Not sure if this was really the case but I remember that Kirk Shireman - the ISS program manager at the time and to whom I sent my images on a regular base - offered the same idea.

Ralf Vandebergh
https://x.com/ralfvandebergh2

[ralfvandebergh]

Explanation of NASA 'meatball' use from NASA website.

''In the “meatball” design, the sphere represents a planet, the stars represent space, the red chevron is a wing representing aeronautics (the latest design in hypersonic wings at the time the logo was developed), and then there is an orbiting spacecraft going around the wing''.
 
''The use of “meatball” in aeronautics also predates NASA’s round insignia, but not by much. In 1957, the U.S. Navy referred to a “meatball of light” in its procedure for landing aircraft on aircraft carriers: “The mirror reflects a bright light astern and upward into a beam which the pilot follows straight to a landing by keeping the “meatball” of light precisely centred in the mirror.”1 This eventually became known as the meatball landing system.''

[ralfvandebergh]

Here are some additional processings from the original frame, for best quality. If you look closely: In the enhanced image it's visible that the typical blue color of the logo appears only there were the logo is. There are some other colors in this enhanced image, probably from (Earth) reflections etc, but the logo color is at the right spot. That is truly remakable!

The corner of the port Payload bay door covers the logo partially btw.

Ralf

[ralfvandebergh]

These are just slightly enhanced in contrast but still look natural and logo color is visible well. Optimal balance I think.

Please click on image for full quality to see the color optimally!

In less optimal conditions - different then in this image, the logo was still visible sometimes but it looked like something was stuck to the port payload bay door edge, it was not resolved from the door edge in that case.