VIDEO: TV CAMERAS LEFT ON THE MOON...

The Apollo TV camera refers to several television cameras used in the Apollo space mission, and on the later Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz Test Project missions in the late 1960s and 1970s. 

These cameras varied in design and image quality that improves significantly with each successive model. Two companies made these various camera systems; RCA and Westinghouse. 

A colour camera flew on the Apollo 10 mission in May 1969 and every mission after that. The colour camera ran at the North American standard 30 fps and the cameras used image pickup tubes that were initially fragile, as one was irreparably damaged during the live broadcast of the Apollo 12 mission's first moonwalk. 

With the Apollo 15 mission, a more robust, damage-resistant camera was used on the lunar surface. All of these cameras required signal processing back on Earth to make the frame rate and colour encoding compatible with analogue broadcast television standards. 

The Apollo 17 was the last mission to the moon, but if no one else is there, who's operating the TV camera as it pans out and follow the ascent module as it returns to Earth – as seen in the video below? 

The view is actually from a video camera mounted on the Lunar Rover, which remains on the moon to this day. Remotely operated by ground control via the large high gain antenna on the rover itself, the shot was meticulously planned, and timed to account for the 1.2-second delay in radio signal across 384,000 kilometres or 238,000 miles. Watch the video below and see how NASA made it possible to record these shots with the TV cameras.