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8
IMAX
The IMAX camera, with film magazine attached, proved to be difficult to stow temporarily.  Securing the camera with velcro or gray tape was not feasible for such a large piece of equipment.  the crew intended to unstow and sort out the appropriate size bungees to aid in securing the camera, but a busy timeline made such a "nice to have" item impossible.  It is recommended that appropriately sized bungees be stowed with any large piece of equipment, such as the IMAX camera, which must be alternately used and then stowed on a frequent basis.

The crew unintentionally neglected to install the camera belt drive guard when the camera was first loaded and set up to film the satellite deployments.  This resulted in a camera jam and a tripped AUX MN A RPC at the end of the first film roll, during filming of the SYNCOM satellite deploy.  Fortunately, only a few feet of film were lost, the camera was successfully cleared, and the tripped RPC was reset.  It is recommended that equipment guards be utilized conscientiously.

After considerable discussion preflight, the decision was made not to fly the "new" film magazines with removable light traps which could be cleaned easily.  This decision proved to be unfortunate, since one of the magazine light traps because badly clogged with film shavings during the flight and required in excess of 1 hour of crew time to clean out, at a point in the flight when crew time was especially critical.  Should the IMAX camera be flown again, it is recommended that the film magazine with the easily cleaned light traps be used, with training as required to overcome any loading problems.

The ice problem encountered during the flight, and the resulting change in the attitude timeline for the flight, severly impacted the planned IMAX operations.  In effect, all of the photography of earth features had to be postponed until the last day of the flight, after the ice was eliminated and we were finally able to return to a good earth-viewing attitude.  This situation resulted in a hurried filming operation, further constrained to filming any earth features we happened to be passing over on the last day.  The change in the IMAX filming plan also cuased us to unload a magazine from the camera halfway through a roll of "exterior" ASA film in order to load and use "interior" ASA film.  We discovered the hard way that a partially used magazine roll must have the take-up real [[reel]] taped in position.  The crew spent considerable time investigating whether the film had come completely loose from the take-up reel, when in fact it had simply unwound almost totally in zero-g.

CLOUDS

The CLOUDS experiment consisted of a 35 mm NIKON camera with 105 mm lens and red filter.  Three 25-exposure magazines were easy to change out.  Two of the three magazines were exposed.

Significant observations are as follows.  As the crew suspected preflight, it was difficult to identify the target and track it from horizon-to-horizon as was requested by the Principal Investigator (PI).  Moreover, it was even more difficult to ascertain the nature of the cloud cover over a target area and determine its suitability for documenting photography.  The experiment protocol establishes limits for quality and quantity of cloud cover which is considered acceptable.  To minimize the effects of these problems, the crew has asked the ground for daily