Astronaut Scientific Debriefings, 1962-1963

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not that much of an artist or poet, but I was trapped with this
set of blues and I did expand on it at greath length, I thought.
These electric blues ­
O' Keefe - (Interrupting) Subtraction is what it sounds like.
Schirra - So it connotes ozone in that sense - electric blue ­
is exactly what it looked like,
A very, very satisfying color.
Dr . Roman - Coming back to the color of Mercury, do I gather from
your comment that you feel it was distinctly yellow, yellowish
f or example, or was it that you didn't pay a great deal of
attention to?
Schirra - No, Nancy, I would say it is very much like any other
star that · I would see, rather than having a color.
I didn't
detect a color.
Dr. Roman - Astronomers think of stars as having color,
Schirra - I have seen different-colored stars from earth-bound
environment and anticipated or, in fact,I was looking for different
colored stars or planets and did not detect any colors.
Roman - This means that your background was just a little too
bright to see colors.
Schirra - That, and the window itself just isn't an optimum plate ­
series of plates - to look thro~gh.
I insisted that what I really
felt had happeried is that I was seeing no more than about 5th or 6th
magni t ude stars · that the clouding of the· windows, as a result of
the escaped rocket, reduced my visibility of the stars about one
magnitude.
In other words there wasn't gross clouding of the win ­
dow .
That is what I was trying to make clear by using magnitude of
stars as the yardstick in this case. I'll stick with that.
This