Word: orbiters
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...McDivitt was busy photographing Schweickart. "Now we're all taking pictures of everybody taking pictures," Schweickart commented. The photographic frenzy continued unabated for the remainder of the mission. Thus last week the world was treated to pictures as varied and excellent as any ever brought back from earth orbit...
Astronaut's-Eye View. Early in the mission, the astronauts trained a movie camera on the discarded third-stage S-4B rocket while it orbited near by and recorded the sudden and startling spurt of flame as its engine was fired to shove it out of the way and into a permanent orbit around the sun. In a sequence showing Spider undocking from Gumdrop, Spider moved slowly away and then began a smooth and graceful demonstration of its maneuverability...
While they were awake, however, the astronauts made good use of their time to gain experience in navigation and tracking-skills that will be vital for landing Spider on the moon and returning to a lunar-orbit rendezvous with Gumdrop. In addition to plotting their position by star sightings, they became the first spacemen to use the planet Jupiter for a navigational reference. The astronauts also twice sighted and tracked Pegasus, a giant satellite orbited in 1965 to record meteor hits. Pointing their scanning telescope toward earth, they obtained fixes on islands, capes and other landmarks to establish Apollo...
Calm Waters. While taking their pictures from a 281-by-113-mile elliptical orbit, the astronauts could see whitecaps in the ocean site southwest of Bermuda that had been chosen for their landing. The weather in the recovery area was so bad, in fact, that controllers avoided mentioning it to the astronauts until McDivitt asked...
...midweek, NASA officials decided that recovery would be too dangerous in the tossing waters off Bermuda and ordered the astronauts to stay in orbit for one additional revolution. Thus, as the earth revolved beneath Apollo's orbit, the next pass over the Atlantic enabled the astronauts to splash down far from the storm, in the calm waters off Grand Turk Island, in the Bahamas. There, the only whitecaps were those churned up by recovery helicopters...