 It's an unfortunately infamous story of Apollo 12. The time the crew lost live TV when the camera was inadvertently turned towards the sun. I'm Amy Shura Tidal, and today on FidgetSpace, we're talking about the sun-fried camera and Bean's Law. Apollo 12 moonwalkers Pete Conrad and Albin only had one camera with them on the lunar surface. It was stored in one of the equipment bays on the lunar module's descent stage, and it was in a position where it could capture both astronauts' descent on the surface. As for the flight plan, it fell to Albin to then take the camera off of its stowed position and deploy it on the moon so it could see the surface activities, broadcasting it to mission control and the world. At some point during this maneuver, the picture in mission control changed. The lunar landscape was replaced by a black screen with a bright shape in the top fifth of the frame. Bean's efforts to fix the picture by either hitting the camera or turning it did nothing. He called down to Houston, let me move it around so the back is to the sun, and maybe that'll help. Maybe that's the way we're gonna have to do it. It turned out that at some point in the maneuver, Bean had inadvertently pointed the lens directly at the sun, damaging one of the image sensors. Had Bean known or been able to cut a wire and disable the automatic light-level control circuit, we would have had footage from the moon on Apollo 12, but this solution only came up during post-flight testing. Bean, unsurprisingly, is still asked about this incident and he's come up with some pretty clever responses. My personal favorite was when he told me that NASA sent him up there with a solar telescope so he did what he was supposed to do. He pointed at the sun. When I met Bean last summer at Space Fest in Tucson, the camera incident came up again. But this time, we didn't talk about what went wrong. We talked about the power of images to share space exploration with the world. It's no surprise that space flight and space exploration appeals to a sort of limited audience. Events like Fillet's recent landing on a comet capture the world for a brief moment, but the interest doesn't necessarily last. The exception seems to be with images. Be they still or video, have the power to capture even the most casual space fans' imagination, if only briefly. Even if you didn't follow Fillet's landing in real time, you probably saw pictures of the spacecraft after separation and probably saw pictures of the lander on the comet. They're pretty powerful images and they evoke a lot in a lot of people. And it's perhaps of no surprise that Bean, a fantastically accomplished artist, is very aware of the power of visual imagery when you're talking about science for people that aren't necessarily in the science field. And so Bean and I came up with Bean's Law, a law that states that every spacecraft that leaves the Earth, no matter where it's going, should have a camera on board to share its mission with the world. What are some of your favorite images of space exploration and why? And for more on my conversation with Bean and a little more on that camera story, check out the latest post over at Vintage Space. And a reminder that I am still live tweeting Apollo 12's mission in real time with a 45 year delay. Follow me as AST Vintage Space on Twitter for the updates, and there will be a lot of them. And don't forget to subscribe here so you never miss a Vintage Space video update.