“Actions that were taken billions of years ago in setting up the relationships of the moon and the earth and the sun,” was Apollo 11 mission director George Hage’s answer to press queries about why the first Moon landing would appear in black and white television instead of colour.

The long answer is that the crew needed shadows to distinguish surface features for their landing, so the landing was scheduled for the lunar morning when the contrast between lit and shadowed regions was high (a full lunar day lasts 710 hours). While the crew did have a colour television camera small enough for use inside the spacecraft, it was not robust enough to operate in the extreme temperatures and vacuum of the lunar surface and handle the high-contrast light and shadows outside the Eagle. By the time of the Apollo 12 mission such a camera was ready, but an error disabled it from sending colour, and Apollo 13 never landed, so it was Apollo 14 which sent the first colour television transmissions from the Moon.

You can read a pair of contemporary news stories about the problem: “Color TV Not Ready For Landing on Moon” in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and “Moon Step at Early Hour” in the San Antonio Express.

More on TV from the Moon:

A pretty comprehensive NASA roundup on the Lunar Surface Journal site.

How the live TV signal was sent around the Earth once it arrived, from the Parkes Observatory in Australia

How early Moon TV cameras worked, from the Hawes Mechanical Television Archive

How Westinghouse engineers decided which type of TV camera to send to the Moon, from American Heritage

And now there’s even a TV documentary about the original Apollo TV transmissions: Live From The Moon

“Actions that were taken billions of years ago in setting up the relationships of the moon and the earth and the sun,” was Apollo 11 mission director George Hage’s answer to press queries about why the first Moon landing would appear in black and white television instead of colour.

The long answer is that the crew needed shadows to distinguish surface features for their landing, so the landing was scheduled for the lunar morning when the contrast between lit and shadowed regions was high (a full lunar day lasts 710 hours). While the crew did have a colour television camera small enough for use inside the spacecraft, it was not robust enough to operate in the extreme temperatures and vacuum of the lunar surface and handle the high-contrast light and shadows outside the Eagle. By the time of the Apollo 12 mission such a camera was ready, but an error disabled it from sending colour, and Apollo 13 never landed, so it was Apollo 14 which sent the first colour television transmissions from the Moon.

You can read a pair of contemporary news stories about the problem: “Color TV Not Ready For Landing on Moon” in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and “Moon Step at Early Hour” in the San Antonio Express.

More on TV from the Moon:

A pretty comprehensive NASA roundup on the Lunar Surface Journal site.

How the live TV signal was sent around the Earth once it arrived, from the Parkes Observatory in Australia

How early Moon TV cameras worked, from the Hawes Mechanical Television Archive

How Westinghouse engineers decided which type of TV camera to send to the Moon, from American Heritage

And now there’s even a TV documentary about the original Apollo TV transmissions: Live From The Moon