Astronaut Scientific Debriefings, 1962-1963

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my dark adaptation and light up my star chart and then identify
these things.
This is the problem we have.
O'Keefe - One of the classic problems in astronomy - one of the
solutions for it is to illuminate with a red light, because you
don't destroy the dark adaptation so quickly.
Schirra - This is why we went to these fingerti.P lights which are red .
I started out, and this might interest you, I went to the planetarium
in Chapel Hill and took both gloves with me.
One had white lights
and one had the red lights.
This was my test of these lights.
We
used them while working in the planetarium.
We lit up the white
lights and the whole dome was just brilliant white.
These are tiny
little peanut bulbs, really minute.
This was the last time I used
those white lights.
That very day - they were painted red as a result
of this .
You need very, very low orders of light to -
Dunkelman - I had the impression the first time we talked about this
that you had not seen any stars through the patch, this brownish
patch, but you feel that you had seen -
Schirra - Yes sir, this is what I am trying to do; recreate the scene .
That is why I went back to coming off Africa.
Having looked for the
lights, and having seen Capetown, I then felt that I was seeing more
city lights and then I was so surprised to realize that these were
stars.
Now this only means that I was not pitched down enough to
really see the earth itself.
So this means that it was quite high.
Roman -
Do you feel that you were looking at the airglow laye r s at
sunset or might you have been looking down at this sort of tangentially
as you are at some angle?