This project site is basically a bench for early experiments in color restoration for selected atmospheric testing era films, obtained from U.S. government sources.
The process is done with digital software and scripting, using VHS NTSC tape sources. Therefore the results will never approach those of commercial, chemical restoration methods using original emulsions.
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Operation CASTLE's 15 MT Bravo early fireball with Compton Effect lightning, March 1, 1954
Thor missiles were built by Douglas Aircraft Company -- later merged into McDonnell Douglas in 1967, and then Boeing in 1997 -- and required manufacturer technicians to monitor their technical operation.
DOMINIC I nearly ran out of Thor rockets, because of unforeseen tracking and rocket component failures. FISHBOWL reached completion with a Nike-Hercules rocket in the last shot, coded as Tightrope.
Instrument pods replaced AVCO reentry vehicles after aerodynamic failures in trial launches. Ceramic plating protected the lower rocket from exhaust eddies created by the pods and their support extensions.
Sadly obvious, not much could be done with the dark areas with digital processing, without increasing defects.
The shoreline cliffs and beach rocks are grey-black basalt.
Scientific monitoring of high altitude nuclear bursts took place at stations like these throughout the Pacific basin.
Flag Plot on the USS Princeton (LPH-5) was the VIP work center of the fleet. This is normally the fleet commander's navigation and operations office, but Major General Alfred Starbird was the joint task force leader of DOMINIC I. (R to L) Dr. William E. Ogle, Los Alamos test director (a.k.a. supreme scientific commander, who also was among the top American negotiators for the use of Christmas Island/Kiritimati during DOMINIC); Starbird, Joint Task Force 8 supreme commander, US Army; Captain Paul J. Knapp, USN, skipper of USS Princeton; Lieutenant Colonel George Kallis, USAF, JTF 8 technical operations deputy; unknown US Navy commander.
MIM-14 (Mobile Interceptor Missile design 14) Nike-Hercules launch in salvo, each capable of reaching over 100 000 feet (30.5 km). This was the type of missile that carried the W31 boosted fission nuclear warhead of the last shot of the entire operation, coded as Tightrope, to 13 miles (21 km) in altitude.
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That looks like Dr. William E. Ogle (below, left), the Los Alamos National Laboratory's field testing division commander:
Johnston Island's large radar tracking dish during DOMINIC I high altitude experiments:
Johnston Island launch pad flyover:
Oil tar sprays suppressed sand blowing the constant trade winds, especially in areas of high vehicle traffic, causing darker areas.
This coral sand crusher was the source of the island's growth over time (update):
USS Sproston (DD-577):
Is this a riometer field to the left?:
A remote island's data capture site:
Long range cameras recorded burst phenomena:
Instrument stations were placed throughout the Pacific basin.
Rafts like these were the bombing targets for nuclear weapons development tests off of Johnston Island, over open sea. Targeting radar reflectors, radio beacons, and flashing lights made them easy to find.
USS Princeton (LPH-5) hosted the fleet command center for some of Operation DOMINIC I. The darker, greyish-blue water under the ship was a sea rise, likely of coral.
Highly radioactive filter paper from a shot sampling mission was loaded into the lead protection casing, called a pig.That Martin B-57 flew through a mushroom cloud to extract bomb debris particles, using filter pods along the wing tips. These samples were flown directly to the Lawrence-Livermore and Los Alamos weapons labs, for fission efficiency analysis.
The relative amount of unfissioned uranium and plutonium among their decay products determined the yield of the fission component. Fireball photography and electromagnetic signal timings between fission and fusion stages were common techniques to calculate the fusion and total yields.
USS Spruance (DD-447) sailed at sea after its FRAM II (Fleet Rehabilitation And Modernization, Mark II) upgrade during 1961 in Hawaii. Mark II was a lighter upgrade intended to extend the useful life of the World War II ship by at least 5 years, and less costly than a Mark I system, with the Vietnamese insurgency growing. The overhaul included the new DASH (Drone Anti-Submarine Helicopter) system, Mark 32 torpedo tubes, and VDS (Variable Depth Sonar), to detect extremely quiet submarines.
Technicians buried this scientific recorder:
Spinning antennas measured signal propagation effects during a nuclear burst:
1.6 megaton yield Chama detonated at 3650 meters (12 000 feet) high.
The Redstone launch pad is to the far right of this flyover view of Johnston Island:
USS Lansing (DER-388) used her VHF radar for pod and nosecone tracking on shot TEAK. Lansing also retrieved an instrument pod after a P2V spotted it two hours after the shot.
During some other shots she ran search and rescue patrols, along with the USS Joyce (DER-317), eventually recovering 13 nosecones in total.
It's unknown what the original colors of his Aloha shirt were:
Joint Task Force 8 was created as a military command structure for interservices participation in the DOMINIC I series.
DOMINIC I was assigned to Pacific Basin tests, while the II phase was conducted at what is now the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS/N2S2).
In the spinup toward, during, and after the Cuban Missile Crisis, 96 nuclear tests took place in 1962. Here are the numbers listed by related fiscal year operations:
34 NOUGAT: weapons development
36 DOMINIC I: weapons development, high altitude and underwater nuclear phenomena, delivery systems, tracking, and military effects
22 STORAX: weapons development and one overlapping PLOWSHARE excavation test called Sedan
4 SUNBEAM (DOMINIC II): tests of small tactical warheads, a mobile delivery system, their military effects, and troop maneuvers
All nuclear tests required the command approval of United States presidents in office during those operations.
The "better dead than red" Cold Warriors would be appalled at the left image.
Instrument trailers were pervasive during nuclear testing operations, for capturing valuable scientific data.
Weapon development airdrop tests were conducted off of Chistmas Island/Kiritimati, now part of the Republic of Kiribati, in the Line Islands group.
Compare to a third party posting, of the original color condition:
Bureaucratic military "good to go" concept in action:
September 1961: Soviets resume testing with the greatest megatonnage series in history
October 24, 1962: film's stated activation of Joint Task Force 8 by presidential decree
April 1, 1962: targeted date for the beginning of testing in the Pacific theater
Early November 1962: DOMINIC I is completed
What? The date for activation should have been said as 24 October, 1961, within a month of Soviet nuclear resumption trials.
Local Gilbertese culture was briefly profiled. This woman was eating copra, a dietary staple of Micronesia.
This was on Christmas Island, at a military zone gate.
This was Operation DOMINIC I's Johnston Island aerospace command center, with the firing panel of the Thor test rockets. Los Alamos Test Director Dr. William E. Ogle (white shirt) and Maj. General Alfred Starbird are to the right. Lieutenant Commander P. Kwart (far right) was the Project Officer for Range Safety (RSO), who personally triggered firing of the missiles, and the warhead's asymmetric explosive destruction if the missile failed to reach the targeted burst altitude.
Notice the bright green artifact at the top right. These scenes are essentially rebuilt color, and they create defect colors in other zones, therefore demanding further treatment of the scene.
A Thor rocket waits for lift-off.
Recovery of a high altitude nuclear fireball environment instrument pod, among those launched by Thor rockets that also carried the nuclear warheads. Before detonations, these pods were released at specific altitudes below and near the bursts. These became radioactively hot during the thermonuclear explosion.
A Martin B-57 Canberra circles near a test site, as part of U.S. Air Force danger zone reconnaissance security.
53 Lockheed P2V-5F Neptunes, provided by the Commander in Chief Pacific Fleet, had many uses during DOMINIC I:
Conduct searches of designated areas
Detect, warn, and escort any unauthorized craft out of the danger area
Assist in the collection of scientific data and provide radiological surveys
Carry out SAR (search and rescue) assignments
A multimegaton droptest fireball rapidly rises at hundreds of kilometers per hour 30 mi/55 km south of Christmas Island. UPDATE: This was the Questa shot.
This is an early color test before spot, scratch, and noise removal.
Standing 6' 5" (1.96 m) tall, U.S. Army Major General Alfred D. Starbird (second from the far right) was the supreme commander of Joint Task Force 8, responsible for executing the objectives and safety standards of Operation DOMINIC I, from April to November of 1962.
Learning among the lessons from the Cuban Missile Crisis, military engineer Starbird was also assigned with directing the implementation of the world's first direct communication system between world leaders, between the White House and the Kremlin. This system is often called "the hotline," and since expanded to reach more than 40 foreign leaders.
Starbird was nearly involved in hostile incident with Soviet spies:
An Account of the Return to Nuclear Weapons Testing by the United States after the Test Moratorium 1958-1961
William E. Ogle
October 1985
Thor rockets lofted all DOMINIC I high altitude test warheads, except for CHECKMATE (by XM-33 Strypi) and TIGHTROPE (in a Nike-Hercules). All these tests comprised Operation FISHBOWL.
Those black buildings were standard Thor liquid oxygen (left) and kerosene fuel valve (right) complexes.
In a magnified view from the same location as the scene immediately above, instrument pods hang from the Thor missile.
Aerospace engineer Maxwell Hunter was the chief designer of the Thor, Nike-Ajax, Hercules, Sparrows I, II, and III, and others.
Thor specifications:
Length: 64 ft. 10 in. (19.76 m)
Diameter: 8 ft. 0 in. (2.44 m)
Weight: 109, 330 lbs. (49, 591 kg mass) at launch
Armament: Nuclear warhead
Engine: Rocketdyne liquid-propellant
Thrust:: 150,000 lbs. thrust (667, 233 Newtons)
Cost: $660,000
(Motor Vessel) MV Acania was moored in Pago Pago, American Samoa, near the southern geomagnetic conju- gate point. Its mission was to record measurements of cosmic noise attenuation due to high altitude nuclear weapons bursts.
Courtesy of Wikipedia
The magnetic and geographic poles are not in the same orientations, and the N-S magnetic poles continually, slowly wander over far northern Canada and Antarctica. This angular difference between geographic and magnetic poles is called the magnetic declination.
Magnetic conjugate points of a high altitude nuclear test were regions of careful studies.
Beta particles -- free electrons created during nuclear fission or natural electroweak interaction decay of neutrons -- oscillate back and forth at nearly the speed of light along these lines of magnetic force, until finally absorbed by ionized gases in the upper atmosphere.
High above the atmosphere there is little to no gas to quickly absorb these fast electrons.
Energetic, charged particles give off electromagnetic energy if their trajectories are significantly changed by a magnetic field. Spiralling around lines of magnetic force fields in the high atmosphere or space (≥ 62 miles/100 km), particles including beta electrons can emit large amounts of energy in the form of an electromagnetic pulse. These massive electrical currents also produce moving magnetic fields that can damage electrical systems, including power grids below, as well as severely disrupt long range communications and radar tracking. The lengths of the oscillation pathways also hugely increase at much higher altitudes, threatening entire continents.
Note in the History section of the restorer's website, the records of the Acania between 1957 and 1985 are a complete mystery to the restoration team and owner. ;-)
The RSO fired the rockets from a simple toggle switch control panel.
TIGERFISH was a non-nuclear rehearsal for flight testing the Thor rocket, and complex recovery operations of the fireball data-collecting external pods.
High altitude nuclear tests were run during the darkness of night.
Thor TIGERFISH liftoff took place on May 1, 1962. Starting April 26, 1962, in the days leading to the TIGERFISH launch, while fixing problems with the pods, there were half-hour practice countdowns twice daily.
To avoid losing pods, each included a radio beacon, a flashing light, and a green dye.
A 400 pound (180 kg) instrument pod was photographed about the USS Grapple (ARS-7) during a recovery operation, after a high altitude shot:
Operation DOMINIC I 1962
DNA 6040F
Operation DOMINIC I 1962
DNA 6040F
Flag Plot is the supreme commander's operational planning, navigation, and tactical control center. Located aboard the USS Princeton (LPH-5), seen here were Maj. General Starbird, his technical operations deputy, Air Force Lt. Colonel George Kallis, an unidentified senior scientific team member, and Dr. William Ogle, (seated at the far right) Operation DOMINIC I's top Los Alamos J-7 Division scientific commander (the test director).
Minor color details need to be corrected such as the blue bordering and green.
