What's The Scale?

This post starts with a little story. Back when I was a kid in the 1960s, I used to watch a science fiction TV show called Fireball XL-5. The characters were puppets. I distinctly remember an episode where a spaceship was sent to a planet or a moon (the details escape me) and the astronauts came back with photographs of the new world that were taken by cameras on their spaceship. But when they returned the commander was not very happy. He told them they forgot to turn on the device (or perhaps it malfunctioned, I can’t recall, this was a LONG time ago!) that would have given them a standard image of scale . Because of this they they had no idea about the size of the objects in the photo.

The astronauts weren’t going to take the drubbing so easily and they pointed out how beautiful the photos were and how it clearly showed things about the planet surface. But the commander still told them the images were completely useless as they didn’t know if they were looking at a city or patterns in a small patch of dirt without knowing the magnification.

When I was going through some of my images, this one reminded me of that story! It almost looks as if it could be an aerial photo of a river or an interconnected pipeline. But, in fact, it is a close up of a leaf. It brought me back to that one episode!

© Howard Grill

For those that are interested, I did find the opening theme for the show by searching YouTube. It really brought back memories. Remember watching black and white on TV?

Incidentally, there was a group of these type of puppet character shows at the time, including Thunderbirds, Supercar, and Stingray. I was a fan of them all! Did anybody else out there watch them?

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