Canon 5D Mark III Photographs Lunar Impact

Well, that was a slightly misleading title. I work at Jet Propulsion Laboratory and yesterday, the twin GRAIL spacecraft were deliberately crashed into a lunar mountain range to rather dramatically end the mission after a year of mapping the gravity field and interior structure of the moon.

Having just received my new 5D3 a week ago, I took advantage of the opportunity to play photo-journalist for the day. I'm still in learning mode with this new toy and I had to be sensitive not to disturb everyone working or interfere with the TV crew that was broadcasting the event live on NASA TV. So I left the flash off and shot in ambient light (I don't think fluorescent light could be called natural). I also set the camera to quiet mode, which was not exactly silent but made a big difference, especially around the TV cameras.

Everything was shot with a 24-105L lens, Aperture-priority, mostly wide-open at f/4. ISO was either 800 or 1600, using AWB and RAW of course. Photos were processed in Lightroom. Very few of the photos have significant adjustments beyond some cropping and basic exposure/highlight/shadow adjustments. I did do local brush corrections to brighten faces where they were too dark, and fiddled white balance for a few greenish faces when AWB had trouble. I wanted to get the photos posted for the flight team last night and there was an open-bar reception at the local Mexican restaurant after work, so I did not spend much time fussing over development (I exceeded my two-margarita limit a bit :).

I cannot say how impressed with this camera I am. After all the carping on this site about what a letdown it was after the Nikon 800D came out, you might have concluded it was a total bomb. I find it to be a highly refined, evolved precision shooting machine. Despite my fumbling with unfamiliar settings, I found that over the course of the afternoon I forgot about the camera as a machine and just reached out and captured moments as I saw them. The AWB performance really surprised me how well it came out. Images still need tuning for perfection, but they started out close. And 22MP makes for a lot of cropping and still getting good presentable shots. Most significantly to me is the high-ISO performance. I could not have imagined using 800 as a baseline and 1600 routinely as shutter speeds got too long. Yes, I can see noise at 100% view, but it is perfectly acceptable and could be easily reduced to unnoticeable with plug-in noise tools.

I've attached a few shots here. A much larger set can be found on my smugmug site:

http://danfinnerty.smugmug.com/Work/GRAIL-End-of-Mission

Grail Mission Control room before the festivities

Maria Zuber, the GRAIL Principal Investigator and her Deputy, Dave Smith

The Mission Manager consults with the Ground Data Systems Engineer

Ralph Roncoli, Mission Design Manager, giving a VIP briefing showing the impact site



JPL Director Charles Elachi (left) and CalTech President Jean-Lou Chameau talking to the Flight System Engineer

Camera man's view, showing Project Manager Dave Lehman and PI Maria Zuber on the monitor

I tried to keep the attached photos small to not use up too much bandwidth, but I'm unfamiliar with attaching photos on the new web site, so sorry if this is too much...

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Dan