Moon Landings

[Liberal]

From Was the Apollo moon landing a hoax?

You don’t actually expect evidence to convince people like this, do you? Any piece of evidence that we could present would simply be, to them, a part of the conspiracy. A good conspiracist can incorporate any piece of information into the big conspiracy without even blinking.

I am delighted that David has finally learned this. Whether its miracles or moon landings, some people will never belive.

My mother (God rest her blessed soul) thought the moon landing was a hoax, but not because of shadows or picture anomolies and such. She thought it was a hoax because she didn’t trust Richard Nixon. She was wrong, of course, but her reason was as good as the rest of the skeptics.

[dougie_monty]

It sounds like your mother was quite perceptive. According to the book Rumor!, which even Cecil quotes, the moon landing came while this country was still involved in Vietnam and many people were ready to doubt any official announcement.

[jmullaney]

He doesn’t adress the one point I’ve always heard and no one has ever been able to explain to me: Why aren’t there any STARS in the pictures from the moon?? I mean, if I can see tens of thousands of stars on a clear night in the outskirts of town, shouldn’t you be able to see at least one or two from the moon?

The conspiracy folks point out that such a detail couldn’t have been faked, so was simply ignored. What is the straight dope on that?

[SINsApple]

The person that answered that question was too busy poking fun to seriously answer the question. I am not saying that I think the moon landing was faked, but I would like to hear the idea given its due credit, and then debunked. Setting up toy soldiers and then knocking them down doesn’t make you look intelligent.

He should have explained the more wide held arguments against the landing, and then explained why they can’t be true. Just saying “well we know it happened” and then poking fun at the idea is not an answer.

Okay, I’m done bitching.

---

Rather, I was in the position of a spore which, having finally accepted its destiny as a fungus, still wonders if it might produce penicillin.
–Ayi Kwei Armah

[Skott]

I would think that it would be fairly easy to debunk the notion that the moon landing was a hoax. Going from memory, there were artifacts from these expiditions that were left on the moon. I would assume then that given a strong enough telescope, these artifacts could be viewed from earth.

I don’t know what size telescope would be needed to view them, but if they were available to purchase, then you could have the doubter purchase the telescope of his/her choice and then have them aim it at the appropriate spot on the moon.

Or is direct observation part of the hoax as well?

Scott

[Karen_Too]

Interesting that SDSTAFF David mentions Stanley Kubrick as making the “hoax film” of the moon landing. In fact, Kubrick’s actual movie, “2001: A Space Odyssey” was made and released in 1968, well before any of the real moon landings. I saw an interview of Arthur C. Clarke where he said that when they watched the real moon landings, they were amazed at how realistic their film had been. (Clarke also watched the real Jupiter fly-by footage half-anticipating to see TMA-2!)

---

-k-
Karen Lingel, Physicist

[BobT]

Originally posted by jmullaney:
**He doesn’t adress the one point I’ve always heard and no one has ever been able to explain to me: Why aren’t there any STARS in the pictures from the moon?? I mean, if I can see tens of thousands of stars on a clear night in the outskirts of town, shouldn’t you be able to see at least one or two from the moon?

The conspiracy folks point out that such a detail couldn’t have been faked, so was simply ignored. What is the straight dope on that?**

Wouldn’t you have to take a fairly long exposure to allow stars to show up? I assume that most of the photos taken were done with flash equipment.
I assume that the video cameras used probably didn’t have enough resolution to pick up stars.

I think people have addressed this topic before.

[Liberal]

Could Hubble see the Tranquility Base aparatus?

[jmullaney]

Originally posted by BobT:
** Wouldn’t you have to take a fairly long exposure to allow stars to show up? I assume that most of the photos taken were done with flash equipment.
I assume that the video cameras used probably didn’t have enough resolution to pick up stars.**

Exposure would only relate to faintness – and I presuppose the stars at night are big and bright – they would have to be.

I almost buy the resolution idea – the stars would be even more pinpointed than normal because there would be no atmospheric scattering of light. But still, there were photographs taken (of the Earthrise and so on) that still don’t show any stars or (other) planets for that matter. Chemical Photography has terribly good resulution. I’d expect some stars somewhere.

[tracer]

From www.badastronomy.com , in its astronomy-related review of Star Wars Episode 1:

When NASA broadcasts live scenes from outside the Space Shuttle, you usually see the Earth in vivid blues, browns, greens and dazzling white, but you never see stars at the same time. And if you can see stars, the Earth is tremendously overexposed. The reason for this is contrast. Stars are fairly faint, while the Earth (or the Shuttle, or astronauts floating in space) are very bright. They’re sitting in full sunlight!

So the Earth, when lit by the Sun, is many hundreds or thousands of times brighter than the stars behind it. When the astronauts set the camera to take pictures, they need to adjust it for that brightness. To expose the Earth correctly, they need to shut out most of the light hitting the camera, and the faint stars cannot be seen. If they adjust the camera to let in enough light to see stars (or more accurately, use a camera which amplifies the light of the stars), the Earth floods the camera with light, vastly overexposing itself. So even though the sky looks black, there will be no stars in the picture.

I have received a few emails about this part, asking if the human eye would see things differently than a camera. In other words, the human eye is capable of seeing higher contrast than a camera, so is my objection still valid? Yes, it is. Ron Parise is a Shuttle astronaut who happens to work down the hall from me (how cool is my job?), so I asked him if he could see lots of stars out the Shuttle window when the sunlit Earth was below him. He said no; the only stars you can see are the very brightest ones, and only a few of those. As with a camera, the human eye only has a limited range of brightness it can perceive, and the Earth (or Naboo!) is so bright it swamps all the stars.

As a side note, I’ll add that some people, remarkably, think that NASA never actually sent men to the Moon; that all the Apollo films were faked. As a piece of key evidence, they cite that all the pictures taken from the Moon have no stars in them! So instead of asking someone who might understand photography, they jump to the conclusion that NASA managed to undertake the largest conspiracy in history. This is Bad reasoning in its absolute highest form.

[jmullaney]

Thanks tracer!

[Keenan]

Artifacts were left on the moon – including mirrors (or, in NASA-speak, “Laser-Ranging Retroreflectors”) so we could measure the distance between the earth and the moon. See this link to a summary of the Apollo 11 mission.

Bouncing your own laser beam off the reflector should be pretty good proof that we left a mirror up there. Of course, if you’re inclined to disbelieve that people landed on the moon, you probably have an explanation as to how this could be faked – which was David’s whole point. It’s not necessarily fair to criticize him for knocking down “toy soldiers” instead of the more substantive arguments, because it doesn’t appear there are any (once somebody posts an explanation about why there are no stars in the photographs – I’m sure I’ve seen the answer before and forgotten it).

I think believing that the moon landings were faked is so demonstrably false that exhaustively rebutting every claim is pointless – especially since the recourse of the disbelievers is to add another layer to their conspiracy. Frankly, it takes two to fight ignorance, and if the reader doesn’t want to play along with Cecil (or David), there’s not much one can do.

[Keenan]

And, the relative-brightness thing was the answer I heard before, too. Serves me right for not doing more research before posting.

[tracer]

Libertarian wrote:

Could Hubble see the Tranquility Base aparatus?

Well, let’s see. The biggest piece of stuff left behind at Trnaquility Base would’ve been the Lunar Module’s descent stage. This would measure about … oh, let’s say, about 4 meters across. The distance from here to the Moon is around 400,000 km, or 400,000,000 meters. This means the width of the lunar module is 1/100,000,000th of the Earth-Moon distance. This means it would subtend an angle of 1/100,000,000th of a radian, which is 0.57 millionths of a degree, or 0.002 arc-seconds.

2 milli-arc-seconds.

That’s pretty darn small.

According to http://www.stsci.edu/hst/ , the faint object camera – the highest resolution piece of equipment on board the HST – can resolve details as small as 0.0072 arc-seconds, or 7.2 milliarcseconds. And at that resolution, a 7.2-milliarcsecond diameter object will appear as a single pixel in the image.

So, an Apollo lunar module descent stage would be 3 times smaller than one pixel in the highest-resolution HST image.

[dwtno]

I was going to bring up the contrast bit, but it’s been covered quite thoroughly already. I will add this: Let’s assume the grand conspiracy as proposed… quite an undertaking, almost on the scale of the lunar landing itself… but what sort of moron would cook up all of this convincing evidence and then forget to paint in the stars?

Another point: the Apollo astronauts did not use flash equipment on the surface of the moon. As previously noted, the difficulty with lunar photography is too much light, not lack of light.

And in an entirely different vein, the original Mailbag article makes mention of Kubrick doing “location shooting” for the moon hoax. Setting aside the accuracy of the claim itself, let’s be clear on just what “location shooting” means. “On-location” simply means “away from the studio.” It doesn’t mean “shooting in the actual place we are attempting to portray.” Star Wars is described as being shot “on-location” but that doesn’t mean that the crew actually traveled to Tatooine. Tunisia served the purpose quite nicely.

[tracer]

They didn’t film Star Wars on Tatooine?! Say it ain’t so!

[David_B]

Jeez. Who’d a thunk a Mailbag item on something this silly would have attracted so much attention. Ah well.

Let’s start with Lib’s comments and work our way down:

Lib said:

Whether its miracles or moon landings, some people will never belive.

Read it again, Lib. I’m talking about a case where there is mounds of evidence, not some guy claiming he saw it on TV or something. Jeez, you managed to hijack your own thread in the OP! That’s gotta be a new trick!

She was wrong, of course, but her reason was as good as the rest of the skeptics.

No, actually, they weren’t. They were based on her mistrust of a single person, not on evidence. If you want to mischaracterize skeptics, go back to GD, 'cus comparing it to those who think the moon landing was hoaxed is pretty silly.

SINsApple said:

The person that answered that question was too busy poking fun to seriously answer the question.

Really? Hmmm, and here I thought the question was answered. Let’s see, I quoted several articles, discussed those who were making the claim, showed the poor quality of the evidence, etc. Silly me.

I am not saying that I think the moon landing was faked, but I would like to hear the idea given its due credit, and then debunked. Setting up toy soldiers and then knocking them down doesn’t make you look intelligent.

I’m not trying to “look intelligent.” I’m answering a question. I dug up info and showed why it was wrong. There aren’t any “toy soldiers” there – I used the very information that those who claim a hoax were using! Don’t blame me because they don’t have any evidence for their beliefs!

He should have explained the more wide held arguments against the landing, and then explained why they can’t be true.

Excuse me, but did you actually read my answer? I’m having my doubts.

Just saying “well we know it happened” and then poking fun at the idea is not an answer.

Which is precisely what I didn’t do. Jeez, if you’re gonna complain, at least make it a reasonable complaint, fercryingoutloud.

Regarding the Hubble question: I don’t think the Hubble can be focused that close to Earth. I’m not 100% certain, but I think it can look far away, but not close in. (Kind of like how you can’t use a regular telescope to look at amoebas on a slide.)

[Fear_Itself]

I agree with Keenan, the Laser Ranging Retro Reflectors offer the best means of independent verification of lunar exploration. According to this site, in addition to the three retro reflectors left on Apollo missions, there are two that were a part of unmanned Russian missions. According to this article, at least four major observatories from around the world have conducted recent ranging experiments and are still getting fresh data from these reflectors, a generation after they were placed on the Moon. This should settle this controversy for any reasonable observer; reasonable being the operative word here.

---

TT

“It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.”
–James Thurber

[dtilque]

Originally posted by David B:
**Regarding the Hubble question: I don’t think the Hubble can be focused that close to Earth. I’m not 100% certain, but I think it can look far away, but not close in. (Kind of like how you can’t use a regular telescope to look at amoebas on a slide.)
**

I’m sure you mean the Moon, not the Earth. At least I hope that’s what you mean.

Hubble definitely can’t look at the Earth (and there are safeguards in its software to prevent it) and it was long thought by many that it couldn’t image the Moon either. It has nothing to do with focusing, but rather that the Earth is too bright and would damage the light detectors (CCDs, etc.).

But it turns out that it can look at the Moon. There have been Hubble images of the Moon published in Sky&Telescope, for example. No images of Apollo landers, though.

---

Dan Tilque

[David_B]

I’m sure you mean the Moon, not the Earth. At least I hope that’s what you mean.

Nope, I meant the Earth. As in, the moon is close to the Earth.

it was long thought by many that it couldn’t image the Moon either. … But it turns out that it can look at the Moon.

Ok. Well, like I said, I wasn’t 100% sure. Thanks for the info!