I knew a guy who worked for NASA in the 60’s. He said they pretty much knew that the USSR could not get to the moon but they kept quiet about it. The reason was that by playing up the “race to the moon” story they made sure that NASA was very well funded.
We can?
I have some specific comments on the photography issues the hoaxers like to spout about. I used to own a Hasselblad 500 C/M, which is the consumer version of the cameras the Apollo astrounauts used (a 500 EL/M). The C/M and the EL/M are identical except the EL/M has a motor drive and can accept big film magazines. I also happen to own a 6 inch stack of 8x8 color prints from Apollo missions 11 through 16.
The alleged photo “expert” should not be surprised that all the shots turned out well exposed and in focus. Hasselblad gave cameras to the astronauts for practice, and they were all camera nuts. Hell, you’d be a camera nut too if someone gave you a free camera that cost about 1/5 your average yearly salary, plus unlimited free film and development. They took TONS of photos on their own, just fooling around even, during the training, and even during their off-hours. They had extensive training in photography, since this was to be primary scientific evidence. They had extensive practice in composing shots without using a viewfinder. And most of all, the “perfect composition” in these shots is due to one thing: CROPPING. The pictures were cropped before these nutcase hoaxers got to them. There are plenty of badly composed, off center, badly exposed photos even in my box of the “Best Of” photos. But they’re almost ALL in perfect focus. And this is not surprising for Hasselblad. The Hassie has one highly prized feature, a very wide hyperfocal distance. This means, when you shoot a scene in very bright light, everything from 3 feet to infinity is in focus. Just set the max hyperfocal distance to infinity, and everything is in focus unless you’re shooting a shot of your feet. And if you do that, just a quick adjustment.
During my own studies in Art School (I have a BFA with a studio concentration in Photography) I met another hasselblad photographer, she was quite famous and widely published. I always admired her accurate exposures, I used to carry around a handheld light meter, it took me ages to get perfect exposures, but hers were always right on the button. I asked her how she did it. She said, “you know those little info sheets in the film pack? You know where it has different preset exposures for ‘Sunny/Hazy bright/Overcast’…? I just use those.” And you know, I tried it and she was RIGHT. Its EASY. Photography isn’t rocket science.
As to the other points:
The Hasselblads were heavily modified with special controls to make them easy to use with gloves. You can even buy some of these accessories today at any Hasselblad dealer. Magazines are extremely easy to change on a Hasselblad. There were no filter changes during the missions.
The film stock wasn’t affected because the primary radiation was Alpha and Beta particles. Even the thin metal of the camera body can stop a an Alpha particle, and if I remember my physics, a sheet of paper can stop a Beta particle. Only gamma radiation will penetrate the camera body and fog the film, and there wasn’t much of that. But I am sure if you subjected the original Apollo films to an electron microscopic inspection, you would be able to find tiny spots where gamma rays had passed through the film and fogged it.
yeah right. Actually, the Kubrick film is probably the best evidence to PROVE that the moon landings were NOT faked.
Kubrick had the best experts and the best technology of the time, unlimited time to produce it, and it didn’t have to go out live. And there is one massive technical error in 2001. Note that during the moon landing sequences in 2001, dust billows up when the engine exhaust hits the moon. Kubrick showed this sequence to NASA consultants and they immediately objected, without an atmosphere to support the dust particles, they would immediately fall to the ground, or disperse in a flat arc. When Kubrick learned of this, he decided to keep the scene as is, since the only way to make it completely accurate would have been to build a huge vaccuum chamber and refilm the sequence inside a vaccuum. This was prohibitively expensive, considering the small number of people likely to catch the error. BTW, this is all documented in the book “The Making of 2001: A Space Odessey.”
And if you watch the Apollo moon videos closely, the astronauts are always kicking up dust. And the moon dust always flies away in a flat trajectory, just as it would in a vacuum. If the films were a hoax, they built the world’s largest vacuum chamber and shot everything inside of it. This is technically impossible, even today nobody could build something like that.
They didn’t throw out the bad ones, they just didn’t get published. For his book Full Moon Michael Light got access to NASA’s cold storage vaults and published a number of shots that could be considered “bad shots”, out of focus, or odd, awkward angles.
An out of focus shot of Apollo 17 Gene Cernan sitting in the LM after the last lunar EVA covered in moon dust and looking exhausted is absolutely haunting.
The book has its share of iconic images but its candid shots like Cernan’s and a mostly black shot of a tiny crescent Earth seen through a triangular window of Apollo 13’s LM Aquarius make it really special.
Close but you got it backwards.
Alpha radiation is the heavy one being a helium atom w/o electrons.
Beta radiation is lighter being electrons
Gamma is (more or less) an electron
As far as penetration power and dammage: alpha gets stopped by a thin sheet of paper, the layer of dead skin on your arm, etc. You just don’t want to ingest it. Beta penetrates farther but still gets stopped by your average pair of safety glasses or a very thin sheet of metal. Gamma radiation penetrates much farther (think x-rays) but does less dammage than the first two larger types of radiation.
For serious penetration power we go with neutrons. With no electrical charge they can race through an awful lot of material with impunity. This explains the massive shielding around a nuclear reactor (which in effect is a controled neutron storm).
Zebra, you’re right about the location of Kennedy’s “to the moon” speech. He gave it at Rice University, in Houston, TX. At the time it didn’t get a big reaction, but it was definitely the source of his mandate to NASA.
I suggest the moon-landing sceptics should read a couple of books that detail all that went on behind the scenes of the Apollo program:
A Man on the Moon–Andrew Chaykin
Lost Moon–Jim Lovell (about the Apollo 13 mission)
Deke! US Manned Space: From Mercury to the Shuttle–Deke Slayton
Apollo: An Eyewitness Account–Alan Bean
…and about a hundred other books that provide incredible details into how the missions worked.
Hey is this some kind of Möbius thread?
I know telescopes aren’t strong enough to resolve Apollo items or tracks, but what about probes like Clementine or others? Does anyone know of any photos on the web that contain Apollo era garbage or rover tracks?
Those of you who are old enough might remember a book from the 60’s that explained how it was faked. I never did read it, anyone remember what it was called?
Cecil did not answer these issues, just the issue of the landing.
The other message subject on the board on this is about the Fox show. Im a bit wary of anything Fox does for publicity.
In a couple years when Japan sends a orbiter for closeup pictures of the moon, we see if the lander(s) is still there.
This book may also be available as “Apollo 13” by Jim Lovell. They republished it around the time the movie came out under the new title.
You do know that I was joking, don’t you Chas?
crc wrote:
No, gamma radiation is high-energy (short wavelength/high frequency) electromagnetic radiation, or a high-energy photon.
Alpha and beta “radiation” are more properly called “particles.”
(And thanks, Guy, for coming up with Rice University as the location for Kennedy’s “put a man on the Moon” speech!)
ya but, it was still a good excuse to lob a good piece of debunking at the hoax.
Help us, Bad Astronomer!
For those of you not inside the loop, the SDMB has the honor of counting one of our members as the Bad Astronomer, a dedicated de-bunker of such bullshit as this latest affront to the efforts of the 500,000 individuals, including my father, who made the landing on the moon possible. His analysis may or may not be available now at http://www.badastronomy.com .
Read him, live him, know him, and visit the freaking Air and Space museum here in Washington, DC sometime, where a wealth of circumstantial evidence from dirty spacesuits to roasted heat shields will give you a sense of perspective, for chrissakes. Just because we can’t do it today doesn’t mean we couldn’t then–that’s your tax cuts at work.
IAAA.
I find it quite interesting that the real clincher that the Moon landings are real have been mostly ignored-- the rocks. Contrary to one of the posts near the beginning, the moon rocks can not be easily faked, or faked in any way I can think of.
Lunar rocks have distinctive compositions found nowhere on Earth-- they have very very very little water (read none). The soils bear evidence of spending a long time on an airless body (implanted solar wind). I could go on.
There are tons of lunar samples, which are still studied today, and have been looked at by hundreds if not thousands of geologists world over for decades (including my wife, actually). Millions of words have been written about them in technical journals. All evidence points unambiguously to an extraterrestrial origin. Visible and infrared spectra have been obtained of these samples and published. Point a telescope at the relevant portion of the Moon for comparison, and the match will be good. If you don’t believe that, one can obtain a sample and take the spectrum themselves. In fact, one can go and reanalyze a sample that’s already been looked at, since sample numbers are known, published, and tracked.
It is inconceivable to me that this evidence can be faked. There are too many geologists out there and too many samples.
Why? I mean, really, folks, these missions are expensive. Getting one of those probes properly launched, deployed, orbiting and functioning costs a lot of bloody money. The mission parameters are very specific. Neither NASA nor the European and Japanese space agencies have the time or inclination to waste valuable resources taking pictures to satiate addle-minded conspiracy buffs when nearly every reasonable person accepts the moon landings as a given.
Furthermore, even if some moon probe were to return pictures clearly showing landers and flags littering the lunar surface, the conspiracy morons would simply claim that they were faked or altered. Look what happened when NASA took more pictures of Cydonia.
Oops. My post should have read “Gamma is more or less an x-ray”
Sorry.