Ye Olde Rocket Forum - View Single Post - Delta II launch @ 1:47 AM PST

Quote:

Originally Posted by jetlag

The British used this stereo imaging technique during WWII. Intelligence personnel were stationed at Bletchley Park (sp?). The intelligence officer would bend over the reconnaissance photos usually taken by a specially equipped Spitfire. He would examine the photos through special optical glasses to view the image in 3D.
Much easier to discern axis hardware this way.
Allen

Ah--those Spitfires sound like the RF-101 Voodoo reconnaissance aircraft, which screamed overhead at low altitude to photograph their targets (they were used during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and some flew so low that their shadows were clearly visible in the pictures). I hadn't known that (thank you for posting this information!), but I'm not surprised, and it makes perfect sense, and:

I've seen, in books (in 2D, of course), British reconnaissance photographs of the Peenemünde facility, with V-2 missiles standing on their launching tables; viewing those scenes in stereo, I'm sure that the V-2s (as well as the gantries, vehicles, and buildings) stood out like so many sore thumbs! Also, 3D stereo viewers--which were very popular in the late 1800s and early 1900s (a late friend of mine had a vintage one and several vintage stereo picture cards, and he also took his own stereo photographs to view through it)--would have been quite familiar to the Bletchley Park personnel (yes, you spelled it correctly). In addition:

The slight settling of the U.S.S.R.'s Luna 9 (the first spacecraft to successfully soft-land on the Moon) after its first television transmission session provided an unexpected opportunity to take stereo pictures, which enabled Soviet and U.S. scientists to measure the sizes of the rocks and the grains of lunar regolith close to the lander. The Viking Mars landers also (intentionally) took stereo pictures of their surroundings; I have a large-format ("coffee table book"-size) NASA book that contains several stereo-pair Viking lander images, and it came with a folding stereo viewer made of thick cardboard, which contains two plastic lenses; it came in an envelope-like sleeve glued inside the book's back cover.