Documents / Official release
This is a preliminary transcript of the Gemini 7 technical debriefing, dated December 23, 1965, from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. It was made from tape recordings of the crew debriefing held December 19 to 21, 1965 at the Crew Quarters, Cape Kennedy, Florida. In it, Frank Borman and Jim Lovell go through countdown, powered flight, insertion, station keeping with the booster, systems, experiments and training. The table of contents also lists a section on visual sightings during orbital flight.
From the source:Release of 2026-06-12 Incident: December 19-21, 1965, Cape Kennedy, Florida. This document is a preliminary transcript derived from voice recordings of the Gemini 7 flight crew debriefing conducted December 19-21, 1965, at the Crew Quarters, Cape Kennedy, Florida. Lights and flashes are mentioned and there is discussion about having proper illumination for vehicle docking. Borman and Lovell discuss celestial and terrestrial observational anomalies and note sightings of Mercury, meteors, aurora, and lightning. They also discuss not being able to see any stars once the Sun comes up.
“Frank Borman”10 pages
150 star, you could not tell when they were over l a pping. Lovell You had to have two stars of the same magnitude in lock . So, I had practi ced and trained in the one with the 50- 50 split which I thought was a lot better than this 20-80 which we f i na l l y ended up with. And this a lso is true when you t ook star t o Moon limb shots because they had it arr a~.ged that most of the light ca.me from the Moon. Eighty percent of the light passage was from the Moon and they had f ilters t o cut that down . And 20 percent came from the sta r . Well , the filters were not dark enough for the Moo.n, and as soon as you got those stars somewhere near the limb they just faded out of view. You coul d not see it so you had a hard time getting star to Moon limb shots . Lovell We noticed one big thing i n navigation with the sextant. Wi th a ful l Moon , you a ~e going t o have a hard time using the stars under the Moon. It just blanks out the light. I t is j ust too bri ght, i t dims the stars and rui.ns your dark adaptation. On no Moo.n nights or quarter Moon nights, most of the stars come out and the na.vigatio.n i s a lot better. We found out a l so on full Moon nights as we said before , tha t we'd use the bottom Earth's hori zon, whi ch i s probab l y an upper air horizon and had the sharpest l i ne of i dentification f or angles.
Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 222 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.