Astronaut John Glenn used an Ansco Camera in his MERCURY Mission. I have the pictures he made.

January 3, 2018

#219

Gentle reader,

One of my fellow camera collectors loves vintage Minolta Hi-Matic cameras. He'd posted a photo of one of his in our FaceBook camera collectors group page. So I showed him this photo of the first Hi-Matic next to it's slightly different Ansco variant.

He replied that the Ansco was used by Astronaut John Glenn in his first MERCURY mission for NASA. I concurred and told him I had some of the slides he made. He thought I must be joking with him. I was not.

Here is a link to a NASA article about HIS camera:

Another Journey for John Glenn’s Ansco Camera | National Air and Space Museum

Here's the catch. As an advertising idea, Ansco offered a packet of four slides made by Astronaut Glenn included with their purchase of  an Ansco Autoset 35mm rangefinder camera. I don't recall how I ended up with the slides, but I still have them.

The first thing I did was get out my light table and line the slides up on it and took the following shots.

My light table is very old and uses "daylight balanced" florescent tubes. Compare the slide frame's color with the light table's surface. It's slightly green. 

Then I shot each slide individually and could not get the camera exactly parallel to the images. But that is OK. I had another idea.

I'm no whiz with Photoshop, but I know a little bit about improving photos. I adjusted the levels and then removed the color cast. Now the images look correct. At least to my amateur eyes. 

I have a twelve-year-old Epson Perfection Photo scanner. So, I scanned the packet first, then converted it to slide scanning. A speed demon, this scanner is not. But it finally got the task done.

The directions specify which way to orient the slide and which side should face up. Plus with "Perfection" in it's name, it should and did do a better job than I of getting the slides to look good. Now, there are dust specks on them, I don't know how to edit those out and did not think for this short exercise to clean the slide's surface. 

Nonetheless,  here they are. I have no idea how rare they are, but they are fifty or more years old. I'm just glad that I kept them.

My late brother-in-law knew someone at NASA back in the day and we inherited a large framed photo taken on the moon. Plus the letter from NASA to him thanking him for whatever he did for NASA. HUGE flare from the sun, but I'm not gonna complain!

Thanks again for taking the time to read this humble blog.

Scott

January 3, 2018