Chas.E: Definitely an interesting story, but I want to make it clear that this time around I’m not talking about multiple light sources. In the footage in question, I see only one light source, but it happens to look like an artificial one (to me).
CurtC: Thanks for the clarification on the round-trip time–that would make a big difference. I think at least some of the points in my post above would still be valid, though, particularly the 45-degree-to-vertical shot, because that still looks like there was somebody operating the camera in real-time. But I’m sure somebody will have an answer for that one as well…
Now, as to your second point, about the lights—I’m going to ask an off-topic question here but I’ve been wondering about this since the last debate, and neither pro- nor anti-conspiracy sites seem to go into much detail on it. Now, if a lunar day lasts about two weeks, and the astronauts landed at the very break of dawn, after one week it would be high noon and the moon would be at its highest temperature, right? Now, obviously, they didn’t stay a whole week—but they did stay for three days. So is it safe to say (assuming we use the markers “6 am sunrise” and “6 pm sunset”) that the sun would have been at about a 9 am position at the end of the mission? There’s no real direction to this question in terms of the conspiracy theory, I’m just trying to figure out where we should expect the sun to be in these photos. The debunker sites seem to assume that it was dawn for three days straight on the moon, and that just can’t be right.
Point three, I’m still not sure about. Whenever I’ve seen photos of the LEM on the moon, it appears to be on even ground. You say “some of the landings were made on a fairly steep slope”—which ones? Got any photos? Are the maria really that dynamic in their terrain?
I was just searching for some information on the terrain of the lunar landing sites when I stumbled across this.
The article purports to prove the Apollo landings via analysis of a photo of the Apollo 15 touchdown site. And as you can see in the photo, there appears to be a large, black blast crater, which the scientists involve say is exactly where Apollo 15’s remains should be. According to the article:
Okay, call me crazy, but haven’t debunking sites such as Bad Astronomy, Moon Hoax, Luna Ticks and Michael Shermer spent rather a lot of webspace arguing that there should absolutely NOT be a blast crater underneath the LEM (to say nothing of one 300 to 1000 feet in diameter)?
I know, I know, it’s off-topic, by my own rules. But that one was just too good to pass up—a perfect example of “take our word for it” debunking.
There was a plume, just not a visible one. I’m planning on rewriting a bit of that page to make things like this more clear.
As far as blast craters go, there aren’t any. The exhaust was far too weak to excavate the lunar surface; all it could do was blow the dust around. However, it did leave scorch marks, I believe. That’s what Clementine allegedly imaged. Remember, this image isn’t verified.
Bad Astronomer: Actually, I don’t think it was you being unclear so much as the people who wrote the commentary for the transcript—using the word “plume” certainly implies a visible flame.
As for the “scorch marks,” I find it hard to believe they were left over a 300 to 1000-foot-wide area. And besides, why would a perfectly clean-burning fuel (ie one that doesn’t create a visible flame) leave scorch marks, which to the best of my knowledge are caused by carbon deposits resulting from inefficient combustion?
The picture may not have been verified, but it is being used as evidence against the lunar conspiracy, at no less credible a site than space.com. Judging from the fact that you felt the need to point out the photo’s unconfirmed status, though, I’m guessing you agree with me that this evidence is not exactly in keeping with the science put forth by yourself and other debunkers. CurtC: I took for granted your 2-second-round-trip figure, but at http://www.ari.net/b2m/0197.html the debunker says:
So I was wondering if you had a cite for your figure…
Invisible flame does not equal “perfectly clean burning”. The invisible flame just means that the combustion products, whatever they may be, are not visible. Lots of very reactive substances are invisible as gases - oxygen comes to mind. Superheated exhaust gases could still react with the lunar rock to produce color changes. Even if the gases were perfectly clean burning, just transferring enough heat to the ground would probably cause chemical or phase changes in the rock, changing the surface color.
Umm, a google search for “earth moon distance” turned up dozens of sites with the distance, which is about 240,000 miles. A google search on [“speed of light”](speed of light) turns up dozens of sites with that figure of 186,000 miles per second.
So, 240,000 miles / 186,000 miles per second = 1.29 seconds for light to travel one way. Round-trip time is 1.29x2 = 2.58 seconds.
Bick, bear in mind that on Earth, where the sun is at 9 am depends on where you are on the planet and what time of year it is. The sun will be at very different places at 9 am in the Artic during the during late fall (where it would indeed be “dawn” all during the short day) vs. midsummer.
I don’t have the faintest idea how this all works on the moon, but I do know I don’t know enough about it to rule out dawn lasting a week.
(Sorry to snip so much.) I’ve personally tried to follow a moving object with a pan/tilt/zoom camera on a delay. It’s very difficult, because you expect your commands to instantly be reflected in what you see on the screen. My guess as to what was going on with the above is that the cameraman was moving the camera around in different directions, trying to reacquire the ascent stage. So, one second after he sees it, the command he sent 1.29 seconds before then (or 0.29 seconds prior to his seeing the thing at all) got to the camera, making it move in an unexpected direction on his screen. As soon as that unexpected motion occured, it’d take an additional 1.29 seconds (plus whatever his reaction time was) to correct for that, assuming that he moved the controls correctly to compensate. And he wouldn’t see the results of that correction for another 1.29 seconds on top of that. (And it’s also likely that the pan/tilt head had “stops” on it that would prevent motion past a particular angle.)
As for the “cloudiness,” the easy assumption is that it was due to some sort of auto-iris “blooming” - pointing the camera up into the darkness of space opened the iris as wide as it would go, allowing light from odd angles to enter the lens. But I’d ask someone who is familiar with the particular video camera equipment used (I’ve only been dealing with video for the past 8 years or so).
What else did you ask? Oh, the final zoom-in. Moving objects are tough to track - stationary ones are pretty easy, especially if you’ve been practicing. Not only that, but it’s possible the setup on Earth had indicators which would show the operator the azimuth and angle the camera would be moving to, in which case he wouldn’t even need to look at the screen (just fiddle with the controls until the indicators read what they read before the ascent stage took off). The niftiest pan/tilt head I’ve ever seen comes with software which allows you to set up a bunch of preset points to move to at the click of a single button - dunno if they had anything that sophisticated back in the 1970’s, but it’s not inconceivable.
If the cameraman were right there at the scene, with no delays, none of these things would have been a problem (except the blooming), and the tracking of the ascent stage would have been much easier. The facts that there are long stretches of video where you see nothing but empty sky, and that the ascent stage moves is strange directions, is actually evidence for the Earth-to-Moon-to-Earth roundtrip delay.
Speaking of which, the seeming discrepancy between 2.58 seconds and 4 seconds is simple: by your own quote, the 4-second figure is for “question or comment,” so add at least 1.42 seconds (for an astronaut to think up a reply) to the 2.58-second lightspeed roundtrip, and you get 4 seconds.
I don’t see it. Explain?
I know some hoaxers claim it’s not the sun because the specular highlights on the astronaut’s masks aren’t points, they’re diffuse. This would mean that the source was a large lamp with a diffuser, not the sun which is almost a point-source. But this has also been debunked, there are multiple phenomenon that could cause this effect, from scratches on the visor, the curvature of the visor itself, to dust on the lens.
I suspect that’s not what you meant, so feel free to explain and I’ll take a crack at it.
Mangetout: It’s possible that taking photos/films on the moon simply wasn’t an option without additional lighting, which, for whatever reason, they didn’t bring. I know that just the other day, I was trying to take pictures beneath a shadowed patio, and the contrast between the darkness beneath the patio and the brightness outside it rendered my subjects invisible—and that was with the benefit of atmospheric light dispersion—even though I could see them fine with my own eyes.
Now, I understand there are no patios on the moon; my point is simply that objects quite visible to the eye can easily come out dark-to-black in photographs, depending on lighting conditions. At http://www.darkstar1.co.uk/Apollo11shadows.rm one can find what purports to be a comparison of the Apollo 11 film to the Apollo 11 photos (in this case, of Aldrin descending to the lunar surface). Check out the disparity in lighting—now, I’m not taking an official position on the film being real and the photos being fake, I just wanted to provide an illustrative example of some sort. What do y’all think? Chas.E: I actually wasn’t familiar with the “specular highlights” argument (perhaps I just overlooked it), but that isn’t what I’m talking about (although it’s still amusing how complete hypotheticals like “scratches on the visor” and “dust on the lens” get thrown around to explain the anomolies and are accepted as “debunking”—I mean, how do you get dust on the lens of the camera but not on the feet of the LEM?).
What I’m talking about is the fact that the first 6 to 7 feet, at least, of the LEM are represented in the film by a shadow that has been stretched out extremely vertically. You can see that, right? Just compare the shadow to a photo of the LEM and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
Now look at the shadow of the flag, which is also about 6 to 7 feet off the ground. It is not distorted vertically—certainly not nearly as much as the legs of the LEM. If the source of light were the sun, and it were distorting LEM legs 6 to 7 feet off the ground, why is it not distorting the flag also held at that height? I can’t come up with an answer to that question, so the next logical step is to assume that the sun is not, in fact, doing the illuminating. If somebody can explain why 7-foot-high features get distorted vertically at some positions but not others, I’d love to hear it. DaveW: I, obviously, cannot prove that the cameraman could not have gotten extremely lucky. In all, though, he executed three re-acquisitions—after some weird zig-zag motions, he loses it at 1:36.0 and reacquires in less than one second, at 1:36.9. It doesn’t take long for him to lose it again, and then there’s a ten-second wait. Seemingly by chance, he reacquires the 45-degree shot at 1:50.8 and corrects to the vertical shot by 1:51.9—again, a mere one-second lag time. The target is lost again at 1:53.7 and reappears at 1:54.5—once again, less than one second. Not even 1.29 seconds, mind you (thanks for the clarification, Arjuna34!). So, to believe NASA’s story, you must believe that this cameraman was not just good, but almost psychic (or, alternately, blessed with ridiculous luck). I can’t rule it out, of course. But I will continue to call it into question until presented with a better argument.
As for your answer on the “blooming,” that may well be the case. I didn’t really think the cloud effect was any sort of evidence of forgery, though I would have thought the plastic cup around the lens would block out, say, reflected light from the lunar surface. But I’m certainly no expert on the hardware; it may be perfectly normal. The big cloud of dust approaching the camera before the tilt up, however, I still find inconsistent with debunkers’ explanations of dust-physics on the moon (to wit, dust on the moon cannot billow up into clouds because there is no atmosphere—it can only be blown out and along the ground laterally). Bad Astronomer, can you help with this one?
You make a very good point about the tracking of the stationary LEM remnants, however—they could have known EXACTLY where it would be (although I doubt they had the sophisticated one-touch system you describe). So I’ll accept that point as knocked out, even though we really are just making assumptions about what sort of technology might have been there. That one seems safe enough to assume, in my book.
However, I strongly disagree with the statement that
As far as I can tell, I’ve already demonstrated that the cameraman’s reactions are either (1) quicker than one second or (2) completely, blindly lucky. If point (1) is true, the footage is fake. If point (2) is true, well, that’s some crazy luck. Either way, there’s no way somebody on earth could have deliberately pulled off such good cinematography on the moon. Again, I can’t disprove that he caught the footage accidentally, but believe I have proved that such an accident would be rather unlikely. Wumpus: Yeah, I knew somebody was going to point that out. The problem is, of course, I have no idea how the solstices and equinoxes work on the moon either! I guess we’d need to know the axial tilt of the moon and how the diameter of a planetoid affects the length of days. This could prove quite difficult, but if we could demonstrate that not all the Apollo missions landed at the poles (if any), we could at least rule out the polar-day effect. Anybody got a map of the moon with Xs where the Apollos landed? Kamandi: I understand that gases are usually transparent. But my understanding was that “charring” (and, for that matter, visible flame) was created not by gases but by particulates. Is it really true that simply blowing superheated gas on a rock will cause the rock to turn black?
If we have any chemists out there interested in chipping in, the chemicals involved were “DiNitrogen Tetroxide and AeroZine 50 (50% Hydrazine, 50% Unsymmetrical Dimethyl Hydrazine)” according to http://www.abc.net.au/science/moon/rocket.htm . I have no idea what the temperature of the exhaust would have been, unfortunately.
Of course, none of this really answers the question of why we don’t see this alleged blackened circle on the ground in any of Apollo’s photos. I guess it was just too big… ?
BB, it’s easy to get dust on the lens. Remember, they were handling moon rocks right at about chest height, about the level of the camera. And they occasionally fell down, which tended to jam the camera lens into the ground if they didn’t catch their fall. The lunar space suits were covered head to toe in dirt after their EVAs. I even recall watching videos where the astronauts paused to clean the lens, they had a dust brush as part of their camera gear, and had to use it constantly.
I’ll go watch the video again, I’m sure there’s a geometric basis for your question.
If the rock surface was chemically reactive in the presence of the hot gas, sure. And what if the exhaust wasn’t burned in stoichiometric proportion? Perhaps there was some unburned oxidizer in the exhaust, which reacted when it hit the rock. No particulates in the gas are necessary. I’m neither a geologist nor a chemist, but my recollection of high-school chemistry leads me to think this is reasonable.
The photograph in question has been ‘enhanced’, so there’s not really a black dot on the surface of the moon. The mark it shows is also not a blast crater, but rather the result of the surrounding dust being stirred up both by the lander rocket and the astronauts. The result is a difference in the landscape that would be invisible on the surface, but makes enough of a difference when viewed from space.
The photo isn’t really concrete proof of a landing, but it would be quite a coincidence otherwise.
Kamandi: Yes, if the rock surface was chemically reactive in the presence of the hot gas. That’s a big if, though. I again implore resident chemists to assist with this question.
As for the “unburned oxidizer,” I can’t really speak for the efficiency of the fuel except to say that hypergolics were used, meaning the chemicals ignited upon contact. If I’m reading The Bad Astronomer right, this is the reason there was no visible flame (the passage there is a bit vague as to the reason for the transparent flame—does ignition upon contact create a transparent flame or is it because of the product created by the chemical reaction?). But assuming the mix was correct, I don’t see why there would be any reactants hitting the moon’s surface, and I certainly don’t see how there could have been enough to blacken a 300- to 1000-foot circle.
Chas.E: The astronauts may have been handling moon rocks at about chest level, but this is no reason for there to have been dust on the lens. Remember that according to the debunkers, dust on the moon drops to the ground like so many tiny rocks, for there is no atmosphere for it to float in/on. Unless the astronauts were rubbing the rocks into the camera lenses, there shouldn’t have been a problem.
You do make a very valid point about the astronauts falling down. That could get the lenses very dusty. However, this poses two new questions: (1) did every astronaut fall down on every mission and (2) were the “specular highlights” photographs in question all taken after the astronauts had face-planted? Without knowing the answer to those questions, the issue of dust on the lens is just so much speculation. Of course, I’m not even sure what photographs you’re talking about with the specular highlights, so perhaps this is an issue best left for another time…
In related news, I think you might be overstating the case a little with the “coated from head to toe in dirt” bit. Unless the astronauts actually rolled around in the dirt, only the front of their suits should have been dirty, as upon falling down, all the dust that shot out from beneath them should have gone sideways and not billowed up and onto their backs. Right?
And, in preview, I see Futile Gesture’s comments. Okay, as for enhancement, the article only mentions that the photograph was taken through a “red filter”—any photographers out there want to tell me how much difference that would make?
In any case, are you seriously telling me that what they are detecting is that “this dirt has been moved around at some point in the last 30 years”? Don’t lunar dust grains pretty much look the same on all sides? What difference would kicking them around make that would be visible from space? And, in any case, why would the dust just coincidentally turn out to be stirred up in a perfect circle (and a perfectly filled in circle, at that)? And where do you get the idea that the extravehicular activities of the astronauts had anything to do with this, anyway, since even the scientist who made the discovery believes “the alteration has been created by the lunar module’s engine during touchdown”? I don’t see any mention of the astronauts themselves as a possible cause. Got a cite you’d like to share?
And, finally, Mangetout. I was actually using a digital camera with automatic everything. And it was a fairly expensive one (the company camera)—the second highest-level Olympus digital camera, I believe. As I recall, the cameras the astronauts were using had fixed settings. Not sure if that’ll help you much… but what did you think of the lighting discrepancy between the film and the photos in that link?
You omitted one other possibility. The camera operator was highly knowledgeable, was informed as to the ascent timing and positions, and had spent a good deal of time preparing for this moment. If you read through the Apollo transcripts, what is apparent is that the people planning these missions had to think of a million things beforehand. The video of the ascent is a minor point, but it was well-planned.
Maybe he did get a little lucky too. But surely you can’t seriously be postulating that NASA faked the ascent video!
Well, there’s a HUGE difference between a digital camera and conventional film; film is a great deal more ‘forgiving’ of over and under exposure and if the degree of over or under expopsure is known, then it can be mostly compensated for during the development process, so I don’t think it’s anything like a fair comparison.
The link? (which turned out to be a realplayer movie) - comparing motion picture footage against stills? - again, not (I think) a fair comparison; the film stock, camera, exposure, aperture, development process etc will be different, and I’m not at all sure what zooming in on the astronaut’s foot at the end was all about.
Bick, I commend your doggedness in your pursuit of knowledge. Your rebuttals are articulate and well thought out.
(emphasis mine)
That’s a pretty big assumption to make. We learned in high school chemistry that it is very difficult to mix reageants in exactly the right proportion. You almost always have a little bit of one left over. That being the case, there could well have been enough unreacted oxidizer to interact with the lunar surface.
In any case, I finally had a look at the satellite photo with the little black dot that we’re talking about. (I didn’t before, and I apologise for jumping in half-cocked. My previous statements stand, however.)
Several comments on the photo. I’m an amature photographer, and I dabble in digital photo manipulation. I’m no expert, but I can make a few guesses:
The photo’s contrast is obviously heavily enhanced. This serves to emphasize the black dot. This doesn’t mean that there was nothing there, but that the actual surface mark is probably very faint.
Considering point 1, there is no reason to believe that the black dot is the result of any scortching or charring of the surface. It could merely be the slight difference in reflectivity of disturbed and undisturbed regolith.
As far as the use of a red filter goes, the filter removes light in the red portion of the spectrum. That’s all. Surfaces reflect the different colors of light by varying amounts. That’s why bananas look yellow, oranges look orange, and my skin looks a pale greenish-blue. Filtering out part of the spectrum sometimes enhances the appearance of those differences.
An example might help here. Let’s split the spectrum of visible light into red, green and blue bands. Suppose we have a rose with a deep red flower and rich green stem and leaves standing in a blue vase. A photograph taken on panchromatic film (black-and-white film sensitive to the whole visual spectrum) would show the red flower, the green stem and leaves and the blue vase all in various shades of grey. If a red filter was added and another photo taken, all the red light would be blocked before the light hit the film. The vase and the leaves and stem would be rendered with essentially the same brightness as in the previous photo, but the flower would be dark.
