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.
“Coast to Coast AM”2 pages
151 Lovell Borman Lovell Borman · Lovell On no Moon nights, the whole a i r glow layer seemed to be of the same consista.ncy. And the sharpest part was t he upper air glow l ayer where we could bring stars down to it. Did you f ind it difficult at times to get the stars acquir ed at the angle? Right. We found out, due to the window design, tllat if the stars were not lined vertically with one another, if we were taking star to star shots or star to Moon shots , i t was hard to get the sextant lined up. The best way to hold the sextant was t he way it was developed originally, just up a.nd down. If you had to move it around here to get a star over here,or horizontal or angle shots, you had to move the spacecraft around to get the window in line, to get all the view. Now we ooul d shoot angl es up to about I think 45 degrees, if we had the right window alignment and had bright enough stars. But anything above that and most of the time around 35 to 40 degrees, one of the two, either the upper prism or t he l ower t elescope woul d get in the way of t he rim of the window and get lost to view . Then we couldn't do anything with it . I remember there were a couple of t imes when you picked up the wrong star too. Yes.
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.