Here’s how I was marking the occasion, 48 years ago:
While we’ve done amazing things with remote sensing and with robotic exploration, we haven’t done much more with manned exploration. Given the success of the robots, we couldn’t have gotten that much information for the same money with men. But as somebody who grew up on “the conquest of space” it’s still a major disappointment.
I have several rolls of such shots. They’re all Kodak Tri-X, bulk loaded, shot with my mother’s old Bolsey 35 I believe (I didn’t get my Miranda Sensorex until December of 1969). Developed with stainless steel tanks in a dish pan down by the laundry sink, contact printed in the waterless darkroom the other side of the basement.
The white bands diagonally across many pictures shows that the shutter speed of the camera wasn’t well-enough synced to the scan rate of the TV. The TV scan rate would be extremely accurate or the picture would be complete hash, so the shutter was off. This was a leaf shutter, not a focal-plane shutter, which affects the symptoms.
This was roll 108; I started the numbering system at 100 to make room for filing older negatives as I found them and organized them. This was so long ago that the negatives were in glassine sleeves.
A few of the individual photos:
[Stuck to the top again for the 50th Anniversary]