Charity drive to feed the empty heads of the Nasa/moon conspiracy theorists

Great Debates
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Well, this is at least getting more interesting…

Let’s see…

Robot Arm: You don’t THINK Apollo 11 took any of the “good films”–do you know or are you guessing?

To say that by the second time man set foot on the moon public interest had dropped off to the extent that these alleged high-quality films wouldn’t make a public appearance until 1989… I don’t know, seems to me there’s something missing there. I mean, remember the Voyager missions? Every time some new and interesting photo was developed, it would at least show up in the paper. These are color movies of man walking on the moon for cryin’ out loud!

You go on to say that you “think” you’ve seen footage from the moon that is better than the live transmissions. All this thinking is all well and good, but it’s hardly the nail in the coffin of the conspiracy. I can’t believe simply on faith that these high-quality films would just have been gathering dust for almost 20 years.

Sam Stone: You say “doesn’t take much of a laser” to reflect off the ALSEP reflectors, then justify that by stating that an OBSERVATORY was able to do it. Not exactly DIY, especially considering the Observatory stopped making observations in 1985, which I’d have to guess was long before lasers were common among amateurs. Even now, I still have got to wonder where you buy a laser with a beam that can travel 500,000 miles and return squarely to a detector on your porch. And though I hate to fall down this slippery slope, it must be noted that if there is a conspiracy, McDonald Observatory could have played along for 10 years or however long it was from the ALSEP placement until 1985.

I’ve never seen the hammer/feathers footage–in fact I’ve never seen footage of anything being dropped on the moon except dust from the soles of the astronauts’ boots and the wheels of the rover. I don’t suppose you have a link for this?

And let’s get some of the figures, so we can all do the math. You claim that “You can easily measure the time it takes for this stuff to ht the surface, and from that calculate the moon’s gravity.” So we’ll look at the dust kicked up by the rover or whatever we can find and time how long it takes to hit the ground. Then we’ll plug our figures into whatever formula you’ve used to make your calculations and then we’ll all be able to see that NASA’s footage indisputably demonstrates the conditions in 1/6 gravity. So, what’s the formula? And don’t forget to take the near-but-not-quite vacuum conditions into acccount, I’m sure that has an effect as well.

You go on to ask me, “Don’t you find it a bit silly to suggest that NASA managed to fake all this stuff so convincingly, but ‘accidentally’ used two stage lights to give double shadows? Isn’t a better explanation simply that the Earth threw one shadow?”

Not if the earth wouldn’t have actually thrown a shadow in those circumstances! I want to see PROOF that the earth throws its own shadow on the moon.

You make several points that, while not proof, might lead to it. “First, the moon has no atmosphere”—so what? I can only assume that you mean by this that the earth’s reflected rays are not diffused by an atmosphere, so they directly impact the surface of the moon in some more shadow-intensive way. But again, so does the sun. The only other thing it seems you could mean by this is a line of thought that would cause us to expect, during a full moon, to see just a bright little circle of sunlight moving across the lunar surface–yet we clearly see the entire moon lit up. How can this happen, without an atmosphere to scatter the rays of the sun across the lunar surface? Be more specific as to the connection between atmosphere and the lack or presence of shadows, please.

“Second, the Earth is much bigger than the moon. Third, the Earth has a much higher albedo”—I’ve said it before, but clearly it bears repeating: even if the earth were ONE HUNDRED times brighter than the moon (which I don’t think anyone would claim), it’s all small potatoes compared to the exponentially greater brightness of the sun. You folks just don’t seem to realize how truly bright the sun is. ESPECIALLY when there’s no atmosphere.

Then we’re back to “the razor’s edge”–you think it’s crazy of me to suggest that NASA would have missed what seem like such important details, considering they would have had to fake “zillions of other complex details,” inluding ones no layman could ever appreciate. And it does seem rather outlandish, I admit. But consider, at least, the following:

(1) NASA would not have had to fake “zillions of other complex details.” Seems to me all they had to do was give the correct calculations of how to get a package of weight x to the moon and back. Pretty much every other detail (how to keep the astronauts alive, etc.) would be glazed over as “space-age” technology that even a well-trained engineer couldn’t understand “unless he worked for NASA.” But I could be totally off base here, so I certainly welcome criticism from all you rocket scientists out there who have independently verified NASA’s data.

(2) If it is true that earth is not bright enough to cast a counter-shadow to the sun, such that shadowed areas on the moon would be completely black, then one would, on the surface, have expected NASA to fake that. But (a) under this logic, it seems, you would automatically reject ANY detail that a conspiracy theorist presented to you–if I were to have said “based on NASA’s initial calculatons of the thrust vector to first orbit, the Eagle would have smashed directly into the crater Tycho–you see, they forgot to take into account the trace amounts of deuterium present in hydrogen fuel” (or some such thing) you wouldn’t believe me because “why would NASA overlook a detail like that? Anything that would lead to the death of the astronauts would have been too obvious a detail to miss.” Pretty much ALL the details are biggies, in the end, when you’re dealing with a moon mission. And using the very PRESENCE of apparent inconsistenicies to argue for the acceptance of those apparent inconsistencies as not being inconsistencies at all… this sort of logic probably wouldn’t fly on the SDMB if a born-again Christian were to say: “Oh, the Bible’s so full of inconsistencies, is it? Well, if the Bible was faked, why would they put inconsistencies in it? That would be stupid!” So it shouldn’t be used here.
but as for (b), just for the sake of the argument… supposing NASA were making a fake and KNEW they were putting erroneous details in it. Can I construct a feasible scenario in which that decision would be made? Sure. NASA, especially at that time, was very bipolar—the bespectacled physics nerd on one side, the hell-fired Army general on the other. If some early, “scientifically accurate” fakes were produced by the first group but rejected by the second as being too dark to adequately convey the sense of Manifest Destiny appropos to the moment… I don’t know, I don’t think it’s that big a stretch. Along that same line of thinking, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that sure, man DID go to the moon, but that for similar reasons the actual photos taken were rejected and replaced with fakes produced on a soundset.

As for your last point,

“Then ask yourself this: of the tens of thousands of physicists, astrophysicists, and astronomers who have looked at the moon footage, the only ones to see anything wrong are a couple of flakes running a web page.”

I don’t consider myself a flake, and I don’t run a web page. I just heard about this 48 hours ago. Did some research. Ever hear that story about the Emperor and his clothes?

I’ll get to the rest of y’all after breakfast.

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BickByro: I have the footage of the hammer and feather falling, on DVD. I have a number of collections of moon footage on DVD. They’re fascinating.

But the hammer and feather stuff could be faked by recording it at a higher speed and then playing it back at normal so it looks like slow-motion. What can’t be faked about the hammer and feather is that they both hit the ground at the same time. That means there is no atmosphere.
And even NASA can’t create a vaccuum in a room as big as that sound stage would have to be.

Anyway, it would be much harder to fake the footage of the lunar rover as it kicked up dust behind it. If you record that fast and then slow it down, everything would look like it was in slow-motion. But it doesn’t. All the other motions in those frames come out at normal speed, but the dust settling takes far too long for it to be on earth. For that matter, with dust particles you can also tell that there is no atmosphere, because they don’t diffuse or get blown around, and their motion is simply much different than it would be in atmosphere (for example, dust will rapidly hit terminal velocity in atmosphere, and settle at a constant velocity. In a vacuum, it continues to accelerate until it hits the ground).

Calculating the surface gravity by timing the fall of something from a known height can be done by anyone who has taken high school physics. It’s a trivial exercise. It would take some time to go over the frames, isolate particles, figure out the particle’s initial height from other references, etc. But once you did, it’d be about 5 minutes of math before you’d know absolutely, unequivocably that you were looking at something in a 1/6 G gravity field without an atmosphere.

The point I made about the lack of atmosphere enhancing the ‘double shadow’ effect is that dispersion in an atmosphere causes ‘fill’ lighting that casts enough light into shadows that you can’t see them. Not so on the moon. If you have two shadows, but one is 100 times brighter than the other, you’ll still see both shadows. The human eye has a very wide range of brightness sensitivity. The film stock NASA uses may not have quite the same amount of range, but certainly enough to see a shadow cast from earthshine.

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BickByro, I have seen this film at the theatre (the Pacific Cineramadome in Hollywood, to be precise). It is stunning, it is breathtaking, mere words can do no justice, yadda, yadda, yadda. It’s available on home video (VHS and DVD) from National Geographic and it shows up on cable TV every now and then. (Currently, the Sundance Channel has it; the next three showings are: Next Monday at 4AM; Feb. 24 at 5:35 AM, and Feb. 28 at 3:00 AM.) Some of this footage had never been shown to the public before. Really.

See it and you will believe that men really did set foot upon the Moon.

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mmm… much better.

Okay.

RickJay: Okay, I’m definitely going to have to get myself some of this high-quality stuff shot on the moon. I see jab1 has provided me with a source, so I’m going to order from National Geographic ASAP. Until then, I can only debate the “common” footage, which I can probably rent if I need more of it. But if this “good” footage didn’t go public until 1989, and the conspiracy nuts are right that the moon soundstages are still at Area 51… well, it’s probably unwise for me to even set foot down that road, but it does seem possible that they were made later.

Let’s stay focused, though. Common footage.

You may well have laughed yourself silly, RickJay, but just because the “allegedly ‘faked’ photos were explained with amazing ease” doesn’t mean the explanations are right. I began this devil’s advocacy because I found many of the explanations on the Luna Ticks page to be flawed. We’re getting close to running the “two light sources” argument into the ground, but I’m more than willing to go on with it. On the other hand, if people are feeling like moving on, there are many other “explanations” given by Luna Ticks (and others) that I would love to dissect and discuss. I agree with you, though, that SOME of the objections to NASA’s story are ridiculous (the “you need liquid mixed in with dust in order to get a footprint” argument comes to mind). I take no responsibility for the content of moon-hoax conspiracy theorists’ web pages.

quote:

If I go outside on a moonlit night I can damn near read a newspaper. If I was 250,000 miles CLOSER to that light source, doesn’t it make sense that it would illuminate things even more?

If you were standing outside on the moon while the sun was up, yes, you could certainly read a newspaper, even the really fine print at the bottom of the bank ads. I don’t believe that was ever in question here. What we’re trying to figure out is whether a separate light source (many have proposed earth) would pull your image out of a dark shadow if you were photographed on the moon with the sun up.

Your lightbulb analogy has two problems: (1) the room has walls, the moon doesn’t and (2) the room has an atmosphere, and the moon doesn’t. Many here have cited the lack of atmosphere in an attempt to explain the “bright bulb” effect of the earth as viewed from the moon; the same argument should hold here. An atmosphere scatters light, producing the effect you describe.

then you say

quote:

…I would submit that shadow contrast always look more varied in photos than it really is. That’s why you can’t see stars in the photos…

As I understand it, the reason you couldn’t see stars is because the astronauts only came out when the sun was rising or setting (got that from a debunking page, actually), and the incredible contrast of sun vs. stars is what rendered the stars invisible (according to a conspiracy page, a few stars do pop up in the photos. Don’t know WHAT that means).

Moving on, I’ll freely admit that the triangulation of the radio signal poses a serious obstacle to the conspiracy theory. But several things must be accounted for first. We need proof, not just hearsay, about the Soviets and others actually checking for a signal from the moon. We need to know for sure whether NASA made the alleged direct-from-the-moon frequency known to the public, or whether they would have at least ATTEMPTED to keep the source channel a secret. Then we’re on the Russians–if they actually did try to confirm that we were broadcasting from the moon, and they knew the channel, and received a signal from NASA’s repeater there, would they have bothered trying to track down the original signal? Can we prove it?

Your personal testimony on electronic warfare is valuable, and sure I trust you, but I need some clarification. How long ago were you in the service? Did these EM-spectrum-surfing devices exist 30 years ago in the Soviet Union?

I think that even those of you who think I’m nuts would agree that if the conspiracy were true, it would have been the single most challenging intelligence operation of human history. In such a situation, NASA would have had access to some of the most sophisticated counter-espionage technology on the planet. Without a little more detail about who was double-checking NASA, how they were doing it, and what NASA could have done to fool them, I just don’t think we can reach finality on the subject.

So, on to the Van Allen belts. The link you provided was quite informative, and I’m not going to pretend I understood all the technical data. But a few points struck me about it–the author mentions that:

“The AP8 proton compilations indicates peak fluxes outside the spacecraft up to about 20,000 protons per square cm per sec above 100 MeV in a region around 1.7 Earth radii, but because the region is narrow, passage takes only about 5 min.”

Am I right that this only says that the MOST deadly region of radioactivity took five minutes to pass through? How long did it take to get through the only-kinda-radioactive parts?

Then we read:

"Assuming a typical thickness of 10 cm for a human and no shielding by the spacecraft gives a dose of something like 50 mSv in 300 sec due to protons in the most intense part of the belt.

For comparison, the US recommended limit of exposure for radiation workers is 50 mSv per year, based on the danger of causing cancer. The corresponding recommended limits in Britain and Cern are 15 mSv."

So in the FIVE MINUTES it took merely to pass through the most radioactive region of the Van Allen belt, each astronaut was subjected to the maximum allowable radiation for a YEAR? And that’s just the U.S. figures—in Britain, they’d say that each astronaut got more than three years worth of radiation in those five minutes! And need I point out that the astronauts had to make this passage not once, but twice? So now we’re up to two years of maximum healthy on the U.S. standard, almost seven on the British–all in two convenient five-minute doses.

Take into account the total radiation from the lesser regions of the Van Allen belt, the whole rest of the trip in space, and the completely unshielded moonwalks, and it makes you reconsider childhood dreams to follow in Armstrong’s footsteps.

http://www.aulis.com/nasa5.htm takes excerpts from NASA’s own answers to the Van Allen belt question and seems to hang NASA with them; it then presents an anonymous source and a small skeptical critique of the source. Peruse it and compare it to your link’s information; see what you think.

I’m going to post this now and move on; my computer’s been on the fritz and I don’t want to have to retype all this if it goes kablooey…

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Next on the list…

Ah, the moderator! The Staff Report is great, but unfortunately its primary topic is the “dust doesn’t leave footprints” argument I was coincidentally just citing as an example of the “really crazy stuff.” I think the Fox special, though characteristically sensationalist, presented arguments that were far stronger and could warrant some Staff Reports of their own. In any case, I’ve got my hands full as it is! But while you’re around… I don’t suppose you could change the name of this thread? The OP was a bit, shall we say, provocative, and I’d hate for people to think this is a borderline BBQ.

pldennison writes, “a completely new moon, by definition, is hanging up there in the sky at high noon, directly in the sun’s glare.” So the whole rest of the day it’s not a new moon? I did not know that. Thankfully it doesn’t seem to present much of an obstacle to my argument.

Revtim, Asmodean: thank you for your support of devil’s advocacy! It’s been lonely out here. I would add that if the hoaxes involved launching the astronauts into near-earth orbit for the duration of the alleged moon mission, it’s possible that Apollo 13 actually DID malfunction in some way, only locked in earth’s orbit rather than the moon’s.

Now I’m back to Sam Stone. A question about the hammer and feather demonstrations: are they close-ups or do you see the entire lunar landscape behind the astronauts? If they are close-ups, NASA would only have needed to vacuum-seal a small area. But is it even that outlandish to suggest they could have created an airlocked soundstage? Sealing the room would have been a relatively easy task, I suspect (certainly no harder than getting to the moon; it’s more along the lines of making sure a Concorde remains pressurized at cruising altitude). Then it would just be a matter of pumping the air out. It doesn’t strike me as outside of NASA’s technological capabilities.

Your lunar rover point is quite amusing. You actually make claims for precisely the OPPOSITE of the debunkers’ party line. Check out http://www.the-indigestible.com/specials/moon.htm under the question heading “Dust – floating.”
Whereas you say that the insurmountable proof of the rover footage’s authenticity is the fact that “the dust settling takes far too long for it to be on earth,” the debunker states that

“On the Moon, there is no air to keep the dust particles afloat, so they naturally tend downward faster. They don’t remain suspended in a plume because there is no medium in which they may remain suspended.
Note it took as long for the dust in the LR shots to hit the Lunar surface as it did for the astronauts themselves to return to the Lunar surface when they were shown hopping along it. That would be impossible in any atmosphere – the dust would settle more slowly…”

So whose debunking is bunk here?

As for the “trivial exercise” of calculating whether we are observing a vacuum in 1/6 G or 1 G, I don’t think any “isolation of particles” would be necessary. You’ve got a DVD with the hammer and feather dropping? Calculate their height based on where on the astronaut’s body they were dropped from. Add a few inches for the moon boots. Get a stopwatch. Then do the five minutes of math, come back and tell me what you find.

Now your point on double shadows and fill lighting… I agree that the dispersion of light in an atmosphere causes fill lighting to appear in shadows (in fact I used this point to critique RickJay’s illustrative example in my last post). And I agree that this effect does not occur on the moon. Therefore it seems you have only bolstered one of my original criticisms of Luna Ticks’ debunking, which is that the clearly evident secondary illumination of the astronauts and LEM could not have been caused by reflected light from the lunar surface.

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**
Er, I just wanna point out that receiving two years’ worth of radiation isn’t quite the same thing as “being roasted”. :slight_smile:

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Actually, in most cases, they obviously ARE right.

Hey, fire away. I’ll have to find this Luna Ticks site.

Why wouldn’t light reflected from the Moon itself be enough?

Forget earthshine. If I go outside during a full moon, I can read a newspaper, or close to it. If I’m standing in the shadow of the LEM on the surface of the moon, I’m doing basically the same thing; the only light I’m getting is what the Sun is throwing at the Moon and bouncing off towards me. It’s the same light source either way; the only difference is that if I’m standing on the Moon, I’m 250,000 miles closer to the light source. The Earth’s shine will add to that, of course.

If we’re bouncing around on the Moon taking pictures of things, it would seem to me that things in shadow would be at least partially visible. How visible they appear in photos will depend on the photo - and if you look at the pictures, it varies from shot to shot.

Oh, no doubt; it’s not a perfect example. But how much scattering can there be in only ten feet of shine (the distance from the light bulb to the furthest corner of my room?) I’d suck all the air out of my bedroom to get a closer approximation, but then I’d die. :slight_smile:

That’s a bit of a simplification. Yes, it’s the sunlight that drowns out the stars, but it’s sunlight bouncing off the Moon and the various objects in the shot. Well, unless the Sun is actually in the shot, but you don’t see many of those.

About 10 years ago, but the technology dates to the Second World War. Radios are getting smaller and lighter, but their basic capabilities aren’t much different. An intercept receiver isn’t a very complicated piece of equipment.

Well, yes. The astronauts were taking a significant risk. As I mentioned, they DID show some of the symptoms of alpha radiation doses, and at least one Apollo astronaut I know of died of cancer.

The URL you provided basically made two statements of fact:

  1. The astronauts weren’t given the level of shielding some recommended they should have on the spacecraft.

  2. Same for when they were on the Moon.

Well, that’s true. They were subjected to considerable amounts of radiation, enough to present a significant risk of cancer - not enough to kill them instantly or make it impossible to go, though. The spacecraft also showed some wear from radiation. To be quite honest with you, if I had a chance to go to the Moon, I’d take the risk too.

48

I’ve been lurking here for a while now. . .

I have neither the time, inclination, or sobriety to refute BickByro’s claims. I would just like to commend everyone here on their astounding patience.

Can’t say any more without getting at least a bit offensive, so I’ll stop here. Good job, guys.

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I think this should be fairly obvious, but the standards for occupational radiation exposure are very conservative.

For acute doses (which is what the astronauts were getting), the lower limit for detectable biological effects is ~250mSv. The lower limit for effects that would be noticeable to the person who got exposed (radiation sickness) is 500-1000mSv. The LD50 is ~3000mSv. So the effect of 50mSv is basically nothing, perhaps an increased risk of cancer.

AFAIK, the total dose to the astronauts for the whole trip was around 500mSv, but that was not an acute dose–it was accumulated over several days. Biological systems are much more resistant to radiation damage when the dose rate is low, so the effect of that dose would be limited to maybe a decreased white blood cell count, if that.

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BickByro: You claimed I said, "the insurmountable proof of the rover footage’s authenticity is the fact that “the dust settling takes far too long for it to be on earth.”

I said nothing of the sort. I simply said that by measuring the motion of the particles you could determine that you were in a 1/6g, airless environment. I specifically mentioned that on Earth dust stays in suspension, and it reaches terminal velocity very quickly and settles at a constant velocity, while on the moon it continues to accelerate.

If you take four frames showing the same particle, and on the third frame it’s shows an acceleration of about 5.3 f/s^2, and in the 4th frame shows the same acceleration, then that particle is falling on the moon.
But I’m beginning to think you’re a troll.

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I’m guessing, but it’s a guess based on some things I do know. During Apollo 11, Armstrong and Aldrin only spent 2 hours, 31 minutes walking on the surface. By Apollo 17, Cernan and Schmidt spend a total of 22 hours, 4 minutes during 3 EVAs on the moon. In addition to having more time on the moon, the later missions had more equipment. The rover, for example, was only included in the last three moon landings. The footage in For All Mankind is edited together as a single composite flight, not attributed to specific missions. There is narration from thirteen different astronauts, Armstrong and Aldrin are not among them, but Michael Collins is.

No, we didn’t see every new Voyager photo in the papers. We saw the pictures that were good enough, as fast as the papers could get them. When someone wants to print a poster or a calendar with images from the space program (chosen for their beauty, not timeliness and curiousity) they go into the archives and find the best pictures they can.

Why not, it’s been gathering dust in your local video store for 12 years and you never went looking for it. Earlier in this thread, you suggested that the poor quality of the movies taken during the Apollo missions cast doubt on their authenticity. Now you say that the good quality films are suspicious themselves. Which is it, exactly?

My figures for the duration of the moon walks came from NASA’s web site. And apparently the special on Fox has also generated some interest there. To support the case that the trips to the moon really did happen, they cite the samples that the astronauts brought back.

“One subject not raised at all in the program was the more than 800 pounds of lunar rocks that astronauts brought back to Earth. Geologists worldwide have been examining these samples for 30 years, and the conclusion is inescapable. The rocks, clearly formed in the absence of oxygen and water, could not have been collected or manufactured on Earth”

from http://www.nasa.gov

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Regarding radio:

We’ve established that there is no “secret” frequency. NASA, at that time, did not use encryption, and many ham operators were indeed tuned in all over the world. One point that has not yet been mentioned is line-of-site. When the Apollo flights were not visible from the US, several radio observatories in Australia and Europe which received Apollo signals and transmitted them via landline back to the US. In order for this to be faked, Australia and several European countries would have to have been in on the conspiracy. Not to mention the thousands of people working in those observatories.

Most of the video you’ve seen was recorded on Earth from the video camera and transmitter in the LEM. This video is of poor quality because of the weakness of the signal and poor quality of video camera technology. The 16mm movie footage is breathtaking.

Regarding shadows: On a clear moonlit night, the moon does indeed cast shadows. The earth certainly casts shadows on the moon. There is no debate here.

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The thing they call the moon looks too small to me for a man to stand on it.
I with those that believe everything is a conspiracy.

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Coming back from my best friend’s birthday party, I am slightly below peak performance but ready to address all personal concerns posted in my absence.

I certainly find it interesting that immediately after I submit a post conclusively demonstrating that RickJay, Sam Stone and/or Luna Ticks have been using contradictory arguments to prove the same point, I get a whole lot of personal attacks.

VarlosZ: You can’t do a thing to refute me, but you’ll rebuke me just the same. What a stellar example of humanity you are.

Sam Stone: I’ve invested the thought and typing time necessary to provide what I think have been fairly persuasive rebuttals (at least enough to discredit the debunkers’ common line that “any two-bit moron” could confirm the NASA landing). I contemplated the notion that you might get personal after I demonstrated the clear contradiction between your “debunking” and that of RickJay, but I was nevertheless quite disappointed to find you would resort to such a cheap trick. I am no troll.

All this in light of the incredibly inflammatory nature of the OP… gimme a break. If I’m completely off base here, let me know folks. But all I’ve ever been trying to do is provide a defense for those who would otherwise be automatically, reflexively dismissed as looneys.

VarlosZ, Sam Stone, Corky, I’m sorry if this bothers you, but the way I see it is, if you don’t like it, you can always move on to discussing the scariest movie you ever saw or whatever is the latest buzz in IMHO.

Well, that about does it for the personal attacks. As for the science, I need to sleep on it…

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Oh, please… Saying, “I’m beginning to think you might be a troll” is hardly a personal attack. As for my supposedly contradictory claims, the only thing my claims contradicted was the statement that you made up out of whole cloth and attributed to me. You claimed that I said that particles on the moon should stay up longer because of the reduced gravity. I said no such thing. All I said was that the particles would exhibit different motion than they do on earth. Specifically, on earth small particles rapidly reach terminal velocity, then descend at a constant speed. On the moon, they continue to accelerate until impact. How that translates into total time aloft is going to depend on the size of the particle, the height it reaches, etc.

And BTW, many of these shots are of wide enough angle that they couldn’t have been taken in a tiny vacuum chamber. The movie of the hammer and feather falling was taken as the astronaut stood in front of the LEM, and a good chunk of lunar surface can be seen around it. A typical way to shoot this in Hollywood would be to have a matte painting of the background, and put a full-scale model of the LEM in front of it. That would require a pretty large sound stage that was completely airless. We can’t do that today, and certainly couldn’t do it 30 years ago.

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Bick, no “personal attack” was intended. When I insult you, you’ll know it. I was merely pointing out that those who disagree with you in this thread have been extremly polite, patient, and thorough in dealing with your claims. If you feel you must have your ego stroked as well, then I will freely concede that their patience is due in large measure to (A) your courtesy and (B) the fact that you don’t seem to be an idiot, a rarity among people making claims as superficially ridiculous as yours.

Note also that I never said I “can’t” rebuke your claims, only that I wouldn’t at the time (coincidentally, I too was recovering from a friend’s birthday party last night; small world, eh?). If you like, however, I’ll try to refute one of your more bizarre statements.

First, it is not the “dispersion of light in an atmosphere [that] causes fill lighting to appear in shadows,” though that may contribute to it. It is the dispersion of light due to non-uniform reflective angles that causes the fill lighting. When sun-light hits a surface as irregular as the moon’s (or any surface on anything but a mirror, really) that light gets reflected in countless different directions, and some of it will be reflected into the shadows on the moon. As others have pointed out, however: even without this obvious phenomenon, the earth-shine probably would have been sufficient to throw light into our shadows on the moon, as well as to cast its own shadows.

As I’ve pointed out, you don’t need a separate light source (though, yes, the earth would be sufficient). If we can photograph things by moonlight on Earth, why can’t we do the same on the moon, where the moonlight is coming from in the first place (and where said moonlight, in shadows or no, would be much brighter than here)? If it’s a full moon and you sit down with a tree between you and the moon, you’ll still be able to your hands even though you’re in a shadow, yes? The newspaper-by-moonlight analogy is about as clear as can be, and I don’t know how to make it any more obvious.

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Just got up and I don’t see any new posts. Oh well.

Where was I?

DuckDuckGoose: Roasted, perhaps not. But receiving two years’ worth of radiation in two 5-minute doses certainly can’t be any good for you. And I still don’t see any evidence against the astronauts receiving even more radiation; the link, unfortunately, only discusses conditions in the most radioactive part of the belt.

RickJay: Luna Ticks isn’t hard to find—I’ve already provided the link. But here it is again: http://www.the-indigestible.com/specials/moon.htm

Let me move on to the next topic after I’ve finished disussing everything that’s up in the air right now…

The reason that light reflected from the moon would not be enough to illuminate objects sitting behind shadows on the moon was addressed by Sam Stone at the end of his 12:26 PM posting yesterday. You need an atmosphere in order for light to “go around corners.” Perhaps Sam Stone would be kind enough to corroborate on this again.

As for the EM scanners, okay, we’ve established (I guess) that the Russians had them. Still, we don’t know much about how they purport to have used them in regards to the moon landing. This point is still a stumbling block for the conspiracy theory, but so far it’s mostly based on assumptions about what was going on, not anything concrete.

Now let’s get something straight: the URL I provided didn’t just state that “The astronauts weren’t given the level of shielding SOME recommended they should have on the spacecraft” (my caps), it stated that the astronauts weren’t given the level of shielding that NASA itself claims is necessary in order to prevent radiation sickness. There is a significant difference there.

And again, until I see some more complete figures on how much radiation the astronauts received (so far, I can account for only TEN MINUTES of the astronauts’ total journey), I can’t accept on face value the notion that the astronauts wouldn’t have at least gotten dreadfully sick.

Bobort: It is obvious that the standards for occupational radiation exposure are very conservative. But you seem to forget that these standards are calculated to apply to situations in which employees are exposed to extremely small doses of radiation spread out over the course of a year (ie a dental assistant’s low-level exposure to X-rays). They are not meant to be applied to single-event exposures such as a moon mission. So no, 100mSv (the astronauts’ total exposure if we assume that five-minute sector of the VA Belt is the ONLY radioactive part of near space) over the course of a year will not hurt you. But that’s not what we’re talking about.

As for whether 250mSv is the lower limit for detectable biological effects… okay, reference please?

As for the claim that the astronauts did not receive an “acute dose”—I’m still not convinced. We’re talking about an exposure time of a couple weeks here—by your own numbers, the astronauts’ would have encountered ten times the U.S. maximum YEARLY “safe” dosage of radiation in a matter of a couple WEEKS. That sounds pretty acute to me. And I still don’t know where you’re getting this 500mSv number.

Sam Stone: Actually, you said:

“If you record that fast and then slow it down, everything would look like it was in slow-motion. But it doesn’t. All the other motions in those frames come out at normal speed, but the dust settling takes far too long for it to be on earth.”

I don’t see how I as misquoting you—it seems you consider the slow falling of dust to be the proof of the film’s authenticity. But whatever…

Yes, you specifically mentioned that on the moon, dust continues to accelerate until it hits the ground. But you did also say, as I quoted above, that the dust settling to the ground in the moon movies takes “far too long” for it to be on earth. Pick a story and go with it, Sam—is the dust settling fast or slow on the moon?

As for:

“If you take four frames showing the same particle, and on the third frame it’s shows an acceleration of about 5.3 f/s^2, and in the 4th frame shows the same acceleration, then that particle is falling on the moon.”

Right. You do that. Or better yet, since you’ve got the DVD and all, use the hammer/feather example I proposed earlier. Let me know how it turns out.

Robot Arm: Surely there must be a way to establish these facts one way or the other–what missions were focusing on color films, what missions were focusing on rock collection, etc. Otherwise it really all comes down to guesswork, unfortunately.

And I still can’t believe that public interest in the moon would have been so low as to cause the color footage (which everyone who’s seen it has told me is breathtakingly beautiful and anything but second-rate) to remain out of the public eye until 1989.
I’m not saying there’s anything inherently suspect about the fact that the films were good quality. Simply that it seems to me the films would have gone public before 1989, a time when, I’d reckon, interest in moon footage was significantly lower than in, say, 1975. It doesn’t take 20 years to develop color film, folks.

As for the moon rocks… what, the proof they’re real is that they were created in the absence of oxygen or water? I’m sure NASA’s ceramics lab could easily have gotten around THAT little problem! Come on…

friedo: Very good point about the Australian and European observatories. I can’t confirm or deny it, but I am curious: who was at the controls at those observatories? as NASA trusting the Australian “space program” to handle communications with Apollo or did they have their own people on location?

By the way, don’t know if you’ve ever been to an observatory, but there are hardly “thousands” of people manning them. They’re really pretty lonely places.

Nobody has accounted for the color footage of the stage separation—how was that filmed? How was it transmitted to earth? Why was it the only color footage of Apollo shown for almost 20 years?

Finally, your point on shadows shows you haven’t been paying much attention to this debate. YES, on a clear moonlit night, the moon casts shadows. The question is whether the moon casts shadows on a clear sunlit DAY.

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aha, there you were.

Sam Stone: Saying you think I might be a troll is a lousy way to make your point against me. As anyone can tell by my number of posts, I fit squarely in the “newbie” category and certainly don’t need my reputation called into question in such a way.

In any case, there was no statement “made up out of whole cloth”—I quoted you directly. You said the dust in the lunar rover shots stayed in the air far too long to have been on earth.

Regardless of all that… you seem to be having a disagreement with with RickJay and (see below) VarlosZ. What’s the deal?

And also, please explain to me how we can keep submarines from taking in water, keep jumbo jets pressurized, etc. etc. but can’t create an airtight soundstage.

Now, on to VarlosZ…

I don’t think that being polite when presented with an alternate point of view is anything worthy of praise on Great Debates–it should be the standard. And I don’t need my ego stroked any more than my detractors do, but yes, I do appreciate the fact that you don’t find me to be an idiot.

Now let me state (if this was not abundantly clear) that I am no optics expert; I took a rudimentary class in college but I’m a writer/editor by trade and training. So I’ve been assuming that when people present to me facts about the nature of physics, they are accurate. But we have got to establish something here.

Sam Stone stated clearly that:
“…dispersion in an atmosphere causes ‘fill’ lighting that casts enough light into shadows that you can’t see them. Not so on the moon.”

But you say:
“…it is not the ‘dispersion of light in an atmosphere [that] causes fill lighting to appear in shadows’…”

From my position, it seems you and Sam Stone have a disagreement. Perhaps you two should duke it out for a bit so we can reach a conclusion on this.

Also, I think you all should remember that we’re not talking about the astronauts being merely VISIBLE when they should be in black shadows—they are actually ILLUMINATED, as though by a secondary light source.

And again, earthshine shmearthshine, when the sun’s up it’s the ONLY thing casting shadows.

You go on to restate an argument made earlier, which makes no more sense now: “If we can photograph things by moonlight on Earth, why can’t we do the same on the moon, where the moonlight is coming from in the first place (and where said moonlight, in shadows or no, would be much brighter than here)?”

Because if you were on the moon, you wouldn’t think of it as “photography by moonlight”–you would think the sun was up! And sure, you could photograph something then. But it would be the sun, not the moon, that would allow you to do so. I, too, don’t know how to make it any more obvious.

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You’re right, it looks like I did say that as an afterthought. Chalk it up to fast typing without thinking. My apologies.

Here’s the straight dope: Particle motion on the moon will look very different than it does on Earth. On the one hand, particles will accelerate much more slowly on the moon. On the other hand, they don’t have a terminal velocity and can potentially reach much higher velocities. Whether gravity dominates the motion or whether the effect of the atmosphere dominates will depend on the size of the object, the height it is dropped from, etc. That’s why a feather and a hammer won’t hit the ground at the same time on Earth, but they will on the moon.

Anyway, I accept your challenge. If I get the time, I’ll go through my DVD’s and see if I can isolate a particularly telling example of particulate motion. If so, I’ll attempt to measure the acceleration, and then I’ll post the exact mission, which DVD I used, and the frame numbers.

For the purposes of doing this calculation, would anyone know the frame rate of the cameras used on the moon? I would assume 24 fps for film, and 15 fps for video. Would that be correct?

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Sam Stone: That sounds wonderful! Can’t help you with the frame rate, unfortunately. And again I wonder why you would need to search for “a particularly telling example of particulate motion”–the hammer/feather experiment should be more than adequate, no?