Pictures of Home from Skylab

Back when I was a pre-teen space enthusiast, I wasn’t much of a reader, but I loved pictures taken from space. Whenever I got hold of a space book or magazine back then, I focused my attention on its pictures and would not read much more than the captions and tables of data (all that would change when I became a voracious reader of anything science-related starting in my early teens). Naturally, I liked the photographs taken by the astronauts of the Earth during the Gemini and Apollo Earth-orbiting missions. While books in the late-60s and early-70s were filled with gorgeous views of far off places, I was disappointed that there were never any photos of where I was growing up in Lowell, Massachusetts about 40 kilometers northwest of Boston.

The first image returned by TIROS 1 after reaching orbit on April 1, 1960. Visible in the upper right are the Canadian Maritimes with a band of cloud below stretching westward across the Gulf of Maine to New England. (NASA)

About the only picture of New England I had seen at this time was the first image returned by the first weather satellite, TIROS 1, shortly after it reached orbit on April 1, 1960 – almost two years before I was born while my parents were still dating (see “The First Weather Satellite”). But this low-quality, black and white television image just did not have the same impact as the astronaut’s color photography which was the best available at the time (at least from unclassified sources). What I did not fully appreciate at the time was that America’s manned spacecraft had been flying in low-inclination orbits which never got close to the 42½° north latitude of my home to photograph it.

This diagram illustrates Skylab’s 50° inclination orbit and how it was able to observe much higher latitudes than earlier American manned flights. Click on image to enlarge. (NASA)

All that changed in 1973 with the launch of America’s first space station. The Skylab workshop was placed into an orbit with a 50° inclination which would periodically pass over all the continental US including New England where I lived. In addition to the potential of astronaut photography, Skylab carried a suite of state-of-the-art remote sensing instruments including film-based cameras operating at visible and near infrared wavelengths. While I was aware that photographs of New England had been taken during the three expeditions to Skylab between May 1973 and February 1974, it would be a decade before I would see any of them. I stumbled upon the first of these images in the early-80s when I was flipping through a university library copy of the classic book, Skylab Explores the Earth (SP-380), published by NASA in 1977. On page 413 in the section entitled “Meteorological Applications of Skylab Handheld-Camera Photographs” by W.C. Skillman and William E. Shenk (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), there was an oblique view of New York and southern New England taken at 18:10 GMT (1:10 PM EST) on January 8, 1974 by the Skylab 4 crew illustrating the effects of cold winter air flowing from the land and over the warmer waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

This photograph, a labelled version of which appeared in Skylab Explores the Earth (SP-380), was the first Skylab photo I had seen of southern New England in the early-80s. It was taken at 18:10 GMT (1:10 PM EST) on January 8, 1974 during the Skylab 4 mission. Click on image to enlarge. (Image courtesy of NASA/JSC, processing by A.J. LePage)

While I would see orbital imagery of New England from the Space Shuttle and some of the remote sensing projects I was involved with as a professional scientist from the mid-90s onwards, it would be decades before I would see any more photographs of home taken by Skylab. That all changed about a year ago. While I was searching through the archive of astronaut photography of the Earth maintained by NASA’s JSC Earth Science & Remote Sensing Unit looking for images in support of my CyMISS investigations (see the CyMISS Page), I stumbled upon archived Skylab photographs. A quick search revealed high-resolution scans of virtually all the Skylab photographs of New England including views of my childhood home in Lowell.

A wide-angle color photo of southeastern New England taken with a Hasselblad camera during the Skylab 3 mission at about 13:52 GMT (11:52 EDT) on September 21, 1973. Click on image to view a full-resolution version. (Image courtesy of NASA/JSC, processing by A.J. LePage)

The first available photograph was taken with a handheld Hasselblad camera in June 1973 during the Skylab 2 mission (an enhanced version zoomed in on northeastern Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire is shown in the feature image at the top of this page). But the image which caught my eye was taken during the Skylab 3 mission at about 13:52 GMT (11:52 AM EDT) on September 21, 1973 – Friday at lunchtime at the end of my second full-week of sixth grade while I was intently tracking coverage of the Skylab missions (see “Growing Up in the Space Age: Summer Vacations in the 1970s”). This large format Hasselblad color photo, shown above, covered all southeastern New England including my childhood home in Lowell. In addition to this photograph were a series of nadir-viewing images acquired by S190A Skylab Multispectral Experiment. This experiment included a set of six 70 mm film cameras which took overlapping swaths of images through a series of filters covering visible and near infrared wavelengths. These images, shown in the montage below, were the only cloud-free S190A photos of my home taken during the Skylab program (the view of the ground during an earlier overpass on September 16 was blocked by widespread cloud cover).

This montage shows the six S190A Skylab Multispectral Experiment photographs acquired at 13:51:50 GMT (11:51:50 EDT) on September 21, 1973. Each image covers an area of about 163 kilometers on a side. Click on image to enlarge. (Image courtesy of NASA/JSC, processing by A.J. LePage)

Since I’ve been working with stereo imagery as part of my recent scientific projects, I could not resist the temptation of combining an overlapping pair of S190A photographs to create a high-resolution 3D view with a 37-meter pixel footprint (just a bit finer than the estimated 40 to 46 meter resolution of the original photographic negatives). This anaglyphic 3D image (left eye red, right eye blue), which stretches from the Massachusetts South Shore northward into southern New Hampshire, clearly shows the scattered clouds in the lower part of this scene high above the ground below.

This is an anaglyphic 3D image (left eye red, right eye blue) created using a pair of overlapping images (SL3-48-305 and 306) taken on September 21, 1973. This 3D image covers an area of about 92 by 162 kilometers and stretches from the Massachusetts South Shore to southern New Hampshire. Click on image to view a full-resolution version. (Image courtesy of NASA/JSC, processing by A.J. LePage)

A full-resolution enlargement of the green-band image centered on Lowell covering an area of about 56 by 37 kilometers is shown below. It clearly shows not only the Merrimack River which bisects Lowell but a lot of other features such as the network of highways connecting the urban centers in the region. Zooming in further towards my neighborhood at the time on Lowell’s Christian Hill reveals a lot of the landmarks I was familiar with at the time – the Reservoir at the top of Christian Hill, Duck Island (where Lowell’s then-new sewerage treatment plant was under construction), the Bridge St. bridge (which crosses the Merrimack into downtown) and “The Dunes” (a disused sand pit just over the city line in Dracut where we often played – a great location to simulate moonwalks as a kid!!!).

Here is a full-resolution, cropped version of SL3-48-306 taken on September 21, 1973 centered on Lowell, Massachusetts covering an area of about 56 by 37 kilometers. Click on image to enlarge. (Image courtesy of NASA/JSC, processing by A.J. LePage)

Here is the above image zoomed in on the neighborhood where I lived at the time on Lowell’s Christian Hill with some key landmarks labelled. This pixelated image (reflecting the 37-meter pixel footprint of the scan) covers an area of about 2.2 by 1.5 kilometers. Click on image to enlarge. (Image courtesy of NASA/JSC, processing by A.J. LePage)

While it took 45 years before I finally found the pictures of home taken by Skylab, I still experienced a bit of that exhilaration I would have felt had I discovered them as a young space enthusiast growing up in Lowell.

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Related Reading

“Growing Up in the Space Age: Summer Vacations in the 1970s”, Drew Ex Machina, July 22, 2019 [Post]

“SA-206: The Odyssey of a Saturn IB”, Drew Ex Machina, May 25, 2018 [Post]

“Christmas 1973 on Skylab”, Drew Ex Machina, December 24, 2014 [Post]

General References

Skylab Earth Resources Data Catalog, JSC 09060, NASA Johnson Space Center, 1974

Skylab Explores the Earth, NASA SP-380, 1977