German astronomers revealed Monday that they possess one of the world's rarest videotape collections: original images of the Apollo moon landings that have been lost by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), dpa reported. Space historians said in May that NASA had lost all but two of the 700 cartons of tapes that were placed in archives in 1970. The images, taped at radio telescopes on Earth, are considered vital in disproving an urban legend which claims the American moon landings never happened. The broadcast images of the day, which still exist in archives, were made by filming NASA video screens. Thilo Elsner, director of the Bochum Observatory, said, "We are one of the few places in the world with the raw images, not copies of copies, but direct signals from the Moon." However his agency had no video, only sound, of the historic first mission, Apollo 11. "We have got pictures from Apollo 15 and the missions after that," he said. That US mission took off in 1971. He said the collection of between 100 and 150 reels of two-inch magnetic tape would be useful, if NASA also lacked originals from that later period. Elsner said the signals could only be picked up by Bochum's 20-metre antenna when the moon was visible from Germany. The first Apollo landing in 1969 was telecast round the world by pointing a TV camera at slow, 10 frames-per-second images received in Australia and California. The tapes made at those radio telescopes have been lost.
