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Cellpic Sunday – The Apollo 13 Command Module

The Apollo 13 Command Module.

Cape Canaveral, Florida.

On April 11, 1970, Captain Jim Lovell, Lunar Module Pilot Fred Haise, and Command Module Pilot Jack Swigert rocketed into space on Apollo 13, the 7th manned space mission in the Apollo series. The mission was to culminate in the third moon landing, however, a sequence of events on April 14 modified the mission and put the flight crew in serious danger for their lives.

A normally routine event went awry and an explosion in one of the oxygen tanks limited their oxygen supplies and NASA personnel started focusing on simply getting the crew back to earth alive. I won’t go into detail on the mission here, there are plenty of reliable sources on the Internet that can provide details. Wikipedia has the story here if you haven’t already seen the 1995 Tom Hanks movie, Apollo 13.

About the photo: In mid-September, we visited the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Among the many artifacts on display is the command module that brought the three Apollo 13 astronauts home safely. I captured the display with my Samsung S23U. After importing the image into Lightroom, I cropped it square and sent it off to Luminar Neo’s HDR module. Even though the image is a single JPEG originally, the sensor in the S23U has a wide dynamic range and Luminar Neo’s HDR module will take a single image and create a higher dynamic range image using the available data in the image file. The final processing was simple, I used the Enhance module to bring out more detail and added a modest amount of structure to add even more fine detail to the module’s exterior. If you’d like to pixel-peep at the photo, you’ll find it in 2K HD on my Flickr site by clicking on the image above.

I encourage fellow bloggers to create their own Cellpic Sunday posts. I never have a specific topic for this feature, and the only rules are that the photo must be captured with a cell phone, iPad, or another mobile device… If you have an image from a drone or even a dashcam, that’s acceptable as well. The second rule is to link your challenge response to this post or leave a comment here with a link to your post in the comment. Oh, and, you don’t have to post it on a Sunday.

John Steiner

31 comments

  17. The Apollo 13 Command Module, named “Odyssey,” is an iconic artifact of human exploration that encapsulates both the triumph and the challenges of space travel. This spacecraft played a pivotal role in one of the most famous missions in space history, where “Houston, we’ve had a problem” became an enduring phrase.

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