Freedom 7

As the United States' first manned mission, I would have expected there to be more documentation available regarding the flight.

Of course, there are the MR-3 sections in This New Ocean: A History of Project Mercury, the Mission Overview at KSC's Mercury Archives page, and the MR-3 mission transcript [direct link to 187K PDF] at JSC's mission transcript page, but there doesn't seem to be a "results of" publication as there were for all of the other missions.

When it was at the Naval academy, Freedom 7 was exhibited in a round gallery with a spiral staircase around half of the gallery. This provided enough space to get overall pictures for only about half of the spacecraft, but required shooting from the staircase for the other half. This did afford the opportunity to get some pictures of the top of the spacecraft.

The earth hanging on the wall was of a back-lit transparency type construction. If properly exposing an image for the spacecraft, the earth looks washed out. If properly exposing for the earth, the spacecraft is very under-exposed. So, I took an extra picture, properly exposing for the earth, and created a composite image.