Kamandi: Some of the factors you discuss are valid at certain times, but I’m at a loss to explain how, for example, the LEM could illuminate its own shadow, no matter how highly reflective its surface.
The moon, too, may have a highly reflective surface, but with a good pair of binoculars you can clearly make out shadows in its craters. The bright walls opposite to the shadowed walls do not bounce back their light and illuminate the opposite walls like some giant reflective screen. Shadows can and do happen on the moon, and they are, if not absolutely black, certainly much darker than shadows on earth (or on my patio).
Earthshine, too, rules out absolute black in certain cases; I can’t deny that. But take another look at that Apollo 11 film footage. Does the shadow of the LEM look that illuminated to you? And if this brings us back to the old “photographic film can be manipulated to bring out details,” you’ve at least got to admit that the more true-to-life images in the moving-picture footage make it clear that there wasn’t that much light coming from any source but the sun.
But that’s neither here nor there at this point. Between CurtC’s inadvertent “debunking” (rebunking?) of the blackened-circle photos at space.com and the apparent impossibilities I found in the LEM ascent footage, we should have plenty to talk about (even if I never find out why that one astronaut’s shadow changes sizes).
Chas.E: Well, with a post like that, you convinced me you know your stuff. Given that expertise, I’d certainly like your input on the difference between the Apollo 11 film and photos in terms of how much they could have “exposed for the shadows” without rendering the non-shadowed areas blindingly white, with no detail at all (and remember that the astronauts’ cameras had fixed settings). For another good really black shadow photo, check out the photo link CurtC put up a few posts back. Those shadows are what I’m talking about when I say “completely black.”
Just a little nitpick: the red filter issue has nothing to do with Apollo experiments; it regards pictures allegedly taken in recent years of an Apollo landing site.
One other thing just popped in my head, Chas.E. Doesn’t exposing for shadows mean you have a long exposure time? Something you’d want to have a steady tripod for, as opposed to having the camera mounted on your chest? I’d think you’d get blurriness problems you wouldn’t have had with, say, Surveyor.
It didn’t. The Moon’s surface dust has a tendency to reflect light back the way it came, and not in all directions like, say, a piece of paper. That means that the sunlight that gets past the LEM gets reflected back toward the Sun, illuminating the shadowed part of the LEM. This is also why you can see features in the shadowed side of the astronauts. This effect is called heiligenschein, and you can do a websearch for it to see pictures of it (though be warned it means ‘halo’ in German, so you’ll have to dig a bit to find the right pages). This effect can be very strong, and can easily illuminate the shadowed side of an object. That’s why shadows that lay on the surface of the Moon are always very black (they cannot be illuminated since they are on on the surface) while vertical objects like the LEM or astronauts get their shadows filled.
On that part of my site I say the Earth is responsible for filling in shadows. I am actually incorrect there, and I need to fix that part. I have pictures I have taken of myself that show this effect very strongly, and eventually I’ll put them on my site.
The Bad Astronomer: You want to talk photographic anomalies, let’s talk photographic anomalies.
Got a source for that claim?
So could you explain to me why the shadowed parts of the rocket and the rock in this photo do not appear illuminated in the manner of, say, the much-debated LEM photos?
Does this mean we can finally retire the old Earthshine story as an explanation for strange lighting effects in lunar photography? Kamandi, I hope you’re reading this…
Bick, the reason that craters shadows look like absolute blackness in your binoculars is because of the very bright sunlight right next to them. Your eye is being swamped with photons.
Here is a related optical illusion I learned in grade school: Take a card which is a uniform neutral gray. Put a white card on it, overlapping only a little bit. The gray next to the white card will look darker than the gray farther away. Replace the white card with a black card, and same area that looked darker before will now look lighter than the rest of the card.
For another experiment, turn off all the lights in your house, and light a candle. Walk around with the candle held in front of you. How well can you see past the flame? Hold the candle off to one side, or well above you. Now how well can you see things ahead of you (where the candle was the first time)? Should be much easier to see in the second case than the first.
Better still: go get a friend (Jack) and go outside together mid-morning or mid-afternoon. Position Jack so that he’s facing you, and the sun is directly over his head, shining into your eyes. How well can you see Jack’s face? Put your hand up to block the sun. Now how well can you see Jack’s face? Better, right? Guess what, the light which is lighting Jack’s face is bouncing off of you, and the objects around you. Take Jack out into the middle of a huge, black parking lot and repeat the experiment - you’ll see similar results.
Oh, wait… The Earth has an atmosphere which scatters light. That’s only true on a large scale. At the distance between you and Jack, such scattering is inconsequential. The blue sky is lighting him up? Does his face look that blue? I didn’t think so.
It’s not that the shadowy places on the Moon were lit by sunlight reflected off the regolith or the other astronauts or the Earth or the LEM, they’re lit by all of these things at the same time, to varying degrees. An argument like “the LEM can’t illuminate it’s own shadow” is simply silly - the shadow is being illuminated by all sorts of secondary sources.
As for the “discrepancies” between CurtC’s response and my own, I’m guessing that CurtC was talking about the whole “film the ascent” thing (which would be a planned activity months in advance), while I specifically limited that response of mine to the “seemingly impossible” trick of the camera moving prior to lift-off - the first 26 or so seconds. After Fendell lost the ascent stage the first time, my guess is still that it didn’t and/or couldn’t follow a precise trajectory (check the LSJ for mentions of “steering” during ascent), and he had to play it by ear. He probably had some sort of “find the LEM” process to follow which involved moving the camera in certain directions for fairly-short amounts of time, and then changing direction in the hopes that the first move would find it, and the second track it. That’s what I would have planned on doing, at least.
As far as I can tell, the ascent video only seems impossible if you’ve got no experience actually trying to track a moving object with a stinking joystick on a time delay. Since this is not an experience many people get to have, I really don’t expect you to believe me, and I have no idea, short of bringing my company’s equipment to you, of how to prove it to you.
But, as Mangetout pointed out, it’s up to you to provide conclusive evidence that the footage was, indeed, faked, since you’re the one making that claim. Your own say-so that there are photographic anomolies or seemingly impossible camera work does not meet that evidenciary burden. Such reasoning is also used to “prove” that alien spacecraft or ghosts or fairies exist, when in fact the most-probable reality is that the proponents of such things simply refuse to accept the fact that “tricks of light” and other photographic weirdness do, indeed, happen on a regular basis.
And as for the precision required for the rendezvous, I doubt it needed down-to-the-second timing. For one thing, there must have been contigency plans for a missed meeting of the crafts. How long did it take the command module to fly around the Moon? Could they have waited an orbit to try again? A few seconds early or late would mean a little more or less distance to cover to docking once orbit was achieved. And if the LEM wasn’t “parked” flat, the ascent stage would shoot off to one side or another (even a fraction of a degree would be disastrous over miles of flight if there was no steering). Neither the time nor the flight path could have been as critical as you’re suggesting.
Well, getting better shadow detail requires a longER exposure time than it takes to record brighter parts of the scene, or a wider lens aperature, or else a faster (more sensitive) film. The B&W films are faster than the color transparency films (which they also used in motion picture cameras). Color films also tended to be higher contrast than B&W film. Photogs sometimes talk about the “range” of their films. Sometimes your film doesn’t have enough range to capture the whole range of brightnesses in the scene, so you either have to expose for the shadows, or expose for the bright parts. So this effect is more pronounced in color films. You have to expose more accurately when you’re shooting color, and it’s easy to lose the shadow detail when it falls outside the range. Or if you shoot for the shadows, the highlights are outside of the range and they’re washed out. You’ll probably notice better shadow detail in the B&W Apollo photos, I’ll have to go dig up some good examples.
Chas.E: When you say “getting better shadow detail requires a longER exposure time than it takes to record brighter parts of the scene,” I want to make it clear that in the Aldrin-descending-the-LEM photo (which you can see, among many others, at http://www.geocities.com/Area51/3543/apia.htm), we aren’t looking exlusively at a shadowed area, but an area in shadow in addition to regularly-lit areas.
Just so you know I saw that…
Problem is, the photos in question are all in color. The webmaster at the site I listed above says
See what you think.
Now, on to DaveW, who said
So when you’re on the moon, the very bright sunlight isn’t right next to you? I don’t get it.
Got a cite?
Yes, but if you take the specific case of the infamous Aldrin-descending-the-LEM shot, you can rule out the LEM illuminating its own shadow, can you not? And I’m guessing you were posting while The Bad Astronomer renounced the Earthshine argument. That leaves Neil Armstrong and the regolith to account for all the apparent secondary lighting. I just knocked out 50% of your light sources; what’s so silly about that?
Well, let’s ask CurtC. CurtC?
In any case, the “seemingly impossible” trick isn’t the camera moving prior to liftoff—in fact, it doesn’t move at all prior to liftoff. I’m talking about the trick of a cameraman who appears to react in 1 second when all his reactions should have taken at least 2.58 seconds.
Did this master tracking plan include the weird zig-zag motions before the LEM is first lost at 1:36.0? And really, what “certain directions” would you move the camera in other than “the way it was going, but higher and zoomed out?” It seems to me that any cameraman who could lose the LEM for 10 seconds but then reacquire it, correct the camera angle, lose it again and reacquire it all in the space of 3.7 seconds wasn’t working with any sophisticated “find the LEM” process; he, at best, waved the camera around and got lucky.
And I still don’t understand how the thing went traveling straight up to dead right between reacquisition 2 and 3. Can you explain that one in concrete terms?
I’m sure there were contingency plans. These might have included another waiting for another orbit. There may have been an ample window for error in getting the LEM to dock with the command module. But this point came up in reference to claims that the lunar missions were all planned “to the second.” Maybe the weren’t. But if they weren’t, it sure would have made life hell on a photographer 2.58 seconds from his camera, staring into featureless space, zooming out, tilting, panning and yawing in the hopes that he would catch a van-sized object launched into orbital velocity on an imprecise trajectory.
What would? I’ve already presented the luckiest cameraman on earth or elsewhere; a billowing dust cloud supported by no atmosphere; a black circle which http://www.space.com claims to be an Apollo landing site, while http://www.hq.nasa.gov says “certainly, from orbit, the areas around the landed LM’s are brighter than the normal surface” (admittedly, this doesn’t prove the lunar footage was faked, but it does prove that debunkers are sometimes full of shit); and just now, with the help of Chas.E, I’ve called into legitimate question the means by which NASA illuminated dark shadows in the Aldrin/LEM photograph without overexposing the non-shadowed areas or causing blurring due to the movements of either Armstrong or Aldrin.
I’m sure I’ll never have the credentials necessary to convince you that I have provided conclusive evidence. But even if I had them, you’d probably just call me a crackpot anyway…
A lesser man might start a Pit thread for such a derogatory non sequitur, but I’ll just let your stubbornness and fear speak for themselves.
But I suspect they may ‘all face the same way’. The settling process is bound to favour the particles ending up on their ‘side’ rather than on ‘end’. The disturbed dust, however, would be every which way up.
A bit of poetic license was in use here. I think the estimates are that they’ll last maybe 100 years before fading.
Much of the uniformity of the circle is, I suspect, due to the nature of the photographic film particles.
Well I don’t know. It’s all relative. How big is the meteor? It doesn’t take much at all to kick up a layer of dust. And I thought we’d established that the mark isn’t ‘visible’ in the usual sense, nor is it black. The blackness is the result of the red filter.
What is it with the atmospheric dispersion? The effect this has is fundamentally no different from reflected light off solid objects. So why do hoax theorists have so much trouble accepting that there is no such thing as an absolute shadow except in a sealed box?
You’re barking up the wrong tree here. The surface was not ‘blackened’, the photo only shows black dots because of the red filter. There is evidence of the surface being chemically altered in some way by the rocket directly below the lander, but the photo is not showing this. If it was of sufficient resolution to see this then it would be detailed enough to see the lander itself.
The dots on the photograph are the result of desturbed dust over a wide area, wider than the blasted surface immediately below the lander. I would say that this disturbed dust is the combined result of the dust blown by the lander rockets and the activities of the astronauts.
Depends on what you’re looking at. Check out this image:
That is just pretty darn good exposure for such a bright, contrasty scene, and it looks like the guy who scanned it knew exactly what he was doing. There are some wonderful optical effects, like some lens flare in the upper right and some weird flare washing out some highlights across the left side, looks like scatter off the barrel inside the lens. Ah, the beauty of handmade German optics, they made Photoshop filters to fake this, but this is the real thing. He’s shooting almost right into the sun, with heavy specular highlights off the bright Rover. Looks like this B&W had a bit more range of exposure than the color shots you’ve cited, and a little less contrast. There is good shadow detail, especially visible in the background mountain ridges, and the shadowed side of the astronaut.
Oh, and I should say, no, none of these issues are serious challenges to the authenticity of the Apollo images. I’ts all a matter of looking at what the film is actually recording. The hoaxers are just not looking at the things that are really being recordedd.
It looks like you’re assuming rectangular particles of dust here—the difference between “side” and “end” isn’t necessarily that great in dust particles, and even if it were, there’s no saying that “end-up” pieces couldn’t get wedged between “side-up” pieces, even if only at an angle (unless you have some cite that states otherwise). Remember also that the top layer of lunar dust is the newest, and hence least settled, layer.
There are smaller and less uniform features visible in the photo. What leads you to your conclusion?
We by no means established that the mark isn’t visible in the usual sense. I don’t know where you’re getting that from. As for the blackness being a result of the red filter, I can acknowledge that the red filter could have made it blacker than it would normally appear. But again, in the photo we see shades of grey ranging from a similar black to a bright near-white. Even if the mark is a few shades lighter in real life, it’s still a hell of a lot darker than most of the rest of the photographed area. All of which, again, flies in the face of the NASA’s statement about the area surrounding the LEMs being visibly brighter, from orbit, than the rest of the lunar surface.
I would say it is not, and so would The Bad Astronomer, who said “In the end, only the dust directly under or a bit around the rocket was blown out by the exhaust. The rest was left where it was.” For that matter, NASA’s site says “As they walk around [the area disturbed by the LEM’s rockets], the astronauts disturb this modified surface and, in effect, restore its normal condition” (emphasis mine). Who ya gonna believe?
Chas.E: That is one hell of a good-looking B&W. You’ve got me at a bit of a loss when you say “the guy who scanned it knew exactly what he was doing”—what does that mean, exactly? Surely you don’t mean that an astronaut with no viewfinder was able to deliberately work in the “wonderful optical effects” you mention (and hey, how did they change from B&W to color film anyway? anybody?).
I don’t know about that. Given the angle of the astronaut’s shadow, I’d say this guy wasn’t even close to “shooting almost right into the sun”—wouldn’t we expect the astronaut’s shadow to point toward the camera if that were the case?
In fact (and this may be only a sign of my ignorance, I’ll admit), there’s all sorts of lighting that doesn’t make sense to me in this photo. Would “scatter off the barrel inside the lens” really account for all the weirdness on the left side of the photo? First you’ve got the “clouds” in the sky on the left, then the brightening shadows on the ground beneath. I’ll admit that the distortions seem to follow a curve on their right edge, which would probably be consistent with your barrel-scatter. But what would account for the similar effect in the top right corner and the “UFOs” above the radio dish? I just don’t know enough about any of these “effects” to say anything more than they look weird, taken as a whole.
But there’s other stuff, too. If the sun is above the mountains on the right, how come (other than the lens flare issue) everything’s so dark in the right 2/3 of the photo? It doesn’t look like it’s only the backsides of hills that are being darkened. I can’t reconcile, for example, the dark region in front of the astronaut’s face with the bright region above his backpack. And where is the light coming from which illuminates the back part of the astronaut’s helmet?
For a classic “non-parallel shadow” example, check out the shadow of the rock above the shadow of the astronaut—what’s up with that? And why does the tallest part of the rover, the radio dish, have the shortest shadow? In fact, why do even the rocks have shorter shadows on the right side of the picture?
None of these still-photo issues or any of the issues being discussed in this thread? What would constitute a “serious” challenge, to you?
Surely you can’t be proposing that only someone who has been to the moon is justified in questioning the authenticity of photos purported to have been taken on the moon. That would amount to no more than saying “we have to take NASA’s word for it—no outside verification is possible.”
Chas.E: You know, come to think of it, none of the shadows in that picture seem to run parallel… what’s going on? I’ve heard some debunking arguments for this before that invoke wide-angle lenses, but how come it’s only the shadows that seem to get distorted?
I could kinda see that, but judging from the angle of the astronaut’s shadow, shouldn’t his helmet be casting an obstructing shadow on the backpack that would preclude any such reflection? Maybe I’m looking at this wrong…
Umm, not the way I see it. The helmut is not directly in between the sun and the backpack, as I see it.
Short of creating a 3D Autocad drawing of the entire scene (including the sun light source), I don’t see an easy way of quantitatively discussing the details of each shadow on this image.
Tell you what: you keep coming up with question after question and nitpick after nitpick. Why don’t you try to find a source for it? Instead of simply asking us thousands of questions, actually go and do some research!
Try this: look for references on why the Moon is 7-10 times brighter when it is full than when it is half full. Part of the reason is the lack of shadows. The other part is… well, why spoil the surprie?
You seem to forget that there is more than one explanation for things here. Not every picture taken had the same camera setting. Some took longer exposures or had the aperture set wider, others didn’t. In this case, it looks to me that the picture was set for short exposure and narrow aperture.
This is my last post in this thread. BickByro, clearly you are not looking for answers, you are looking to attack anyone’s ideas who doesn’t believe in the conspiracy theory. This sort of thing loses its luster pretty quickly for me; I have had enough of it over the past few months. Nothing said here will ever convince you that the Apollo missions were real, so I for one will stop trying. Hopefully people sitting on the fence in this issue will see past what you are doing and realize that you have achieved a diminishing returns, where you have to dig deeper and deeper to find “flaws”, when all along the biggest reasons you had in the first place have long since been debunked.
Byck, I meant that the person who scanned this image did an excellent job of capturing the range of brightnesses in the print into an accurate scan, without losing brightness detail. I downloaded it and looked at the histogram in photoshop, it is easy to see these things if you know what you’re looking for. And that’s one of the main points. No, NASA isn’t the only one who can authenticate these images, anyone with a basic knowledge of optics and photography can see these same effects, and know these are real optical effects that are almost impossible to fake.
I think I’m going to have to agree with Bad Astronomer, you can nitpick all these points and I can probably show you what is happening at each point, but unless you learn some photographic technique, and how to interpret photos generally, you’re not looking at the “big picture.” If you want to analyze these prints, go bone up on your photography.
My point exactly - it’s wholly unsound to be comparing the NASA photos to photos you took on your patio with completely different equipment, under totally different conditions.
The shadows are much larger. It’s all about the percentage of your visual field taken up by bright stuff. Do the experiments.
Oh, please. A little thought ought to show that if photons often did U-turns in the space of a few feet, the air itself would have a fairly uniform glow to it from all the light traveling in all sorts of random directions. Rayleigh scattering (why the sky is blue) on a tremendously small scale. Objects a few yards away would be blurry, even if you had 20/20 vision, since photons reflected from them could take randomly-curved paths to your eyes. Glasses, binoculars, telescopes? All worthless. No laser-light shows. Imagine a world in which wherever you look more than, say, 200 yards, there’s just a fog tinted the color of whatever is behind it.
You ‘knocked out’ 50% of the light sources I mentioned by name. But it’s not silly - that’s not what I was saying was silly.
You’re wrong on that point. The zoom out begins just before ignition.
If you cling to the idea that the camera motion is a ‘reaction’, I’m done here. I don’t know how I can explain it any differently than I already have. Allow me to use your tactic of asking more questions: if that 1-second change in camera motion is a ‘reaction’, then why did he fail to react and keep the ascent stage in view? After the change, it’s much longer than one second before it crawls off the other edge of the frame.
For one thing, you can only zoom out so far. There’s a limit. Secondly, the planned trajectory of the ascent stage may have taken it in directions which would be impossible to track directly - for example, if it went over the camera, which, from pictures of the rover, appears to be a fairly-standard kind of pan/tilt head, which can’t track to 90 degrees of azimuth, much less past 90. The operator would have had to spin the camera around horizontally and then tilt it down some. In other words, there’s a limit to how “high” you can track, too. As for the rest of it - go find Fendell. He’ll tell you.
That’s fine with me. I accept “getting lucky” as a suitable debunking of your claim.
The cameraman waved the camera around and got lucky.
There were planned out to the second, through a tremendous number of rehearsals here on Earth prior to launch. But if you go through the transcripts, you’ll find that it was an odd task indeed that worked out exactly right.
I, for one, never said anything that should have been taken as a claim that the operator had an easy job. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to be in Fendell’s shoes that day.
No, you’ve presented a lucky cameraman. Lucky shots happen all the time.
Not at all. Whether you’ve got credentials or not is completely irrelevant. High-school students can make important discoveries, and PhDs can be wrong.
And what you consider to be conclusive evidence (that the landings were faked - or just the images - I can’t tell what you’re providing evidence for anymore), many other people, including myself, apparently feel has mundane explanations. In the points I’ve chosen to argue, I don’t see anything at all conclusive. Your “reacquisition theory” hinges on your use of the word “luckiest,” which all of my admittedly-meager experience tells me is nothing but hyperbole. Your “shadow theory” hinges on your lack of knowledge (you keep asking questions about fairly basic stuff) about the response of the human eye, and TV and still cameras to light and darkness in various situations.
It certainly wasn’t meant as derogatory, it was meant as a reminder to not fall into the same logical trap as so many others have before you. If you find that derogatory, perhaps it’s too late. As for stubbornness, I’d like you to quote passages from my posts where you think I’ve been stubborn. I think I’ve been nothing but patient and honest, except for the kitty-litter joke. And fear? Please. If you think my world revolves so strongly around whether or not the Moon landings happened that I’d be scared to have my opinion overturned by good evidence, you are very much mistaken. Very little about my life would change. It’s quite arrogant of you to think you know me that well.
A lesser man might suggest that you are attributing characteristics to me which you exhibit yourself, but I’ll just let your posts speak for themselves.
In posts, you wrote:
Chas.E already explained that. It’s quite common.
Looks to me like the shadow of the antenna is hitting a small hill, which would shorten it. Big clue: the sunlit rock in the middle of the shadow.
Ever see sunbeams coming through clouds right here on Earth? Why don’t they look parallel to each other? Go find out, and I expect you’ll find the answer to the non-parallel shadows on the Moon, without need of wide-angle lens distortion.
Looks to me like the astronaut is facing between 30 and 45 degrees to the right of the sun - plenty of angle for the helmet shadow to miss the backpack, based on the geometry I see. It’s a pity that his shadow is chopped off by the edge of the picture - I suspect, if on flat terrain, you’d see distinct helmet and backpack shadows there.
