Apollo 11 Moon Landing Revisited: Hoax ~vs~ Debunk

[jimbob]

Well, the Soviet Chief Designer who put Sputnik up there, Korolev, sent up eight or nine Luna modules in the early to mid-60's trialling soft landings on the moon. Almost all of them crashed. So it was very brave to send up three guys in a module that had crashed to earth just 14 months earlier of the prototype model tested by Armstrong himself at NASA.

You do realise that the US was not the USSR.

The Eastern Bloc and the West had very different approaches to engineering and dealing with experimental failures as well as technical capabilities in things like machine tools and computing.

 

[zooterkin]

The problem is as I see it from Allen's POV is that the debunking explanations re his queries about shadows, lighting and dark skies seem to be on a level of insulting the intelligence of a primary school class.

Why would you give any credence to what some random angry youtuber says?

 

[zooterkin]

Your mistake here is thinking the Apollo photos were night photography. They were not. It was full daylight. The sky was black instead of blue due to the lack of an atmosphere, but otherwise the exposure was set for objects in full sunlight.

If you set your camera for daylight photography, then come back out at night and take a picture of the stars without changing the exposure, you won't see any stars in your photo. It's as simple as that. An experienced photographer would completely understand that and I am not inclined to believe he simply didn't grasp it.

But that can't be correct, because VIxen didn't understand it, yet she claims to be a photographer...

 

[Thermal]

But that can't be correct, because VIxen didn't understand it, yet she claims to be a photographer...

I'm always amazed at this claim: "I'm a half-assed amateur photographer, and the crew that was contracted to fool the entirety of the human race was far more amateurish than me, like a senile granny trying to take a picture with a bottle of ketchup". The hubris is just breathtaking.

 

[Reformed Offlian]

The problem is as I see it from Allen's POV is that the debunking explanations re his queries about shadows, lighting and dark skies seem to be on a level of insulting the intelligence of a primary school class. For example, Dr. Tony Cook in the OP video brushes it off by showing us pix of shadows going every which way in a local street and then we are given the facile, oh try taking a pic of the night sky whilst standing under a street lamp, as if the average photographer doesn't understand how lighting and apertures work. Please! I've taken pics of the night sky. No problem in catching the stars.

Did you do so while standing under a lit street lamp? Did you ever take a selfie with the night sky in the background that showed stars? Why are you resorting to bad-faith arguments to defend Allen?

 

[JayUtah]

Why would you give any credence to what some random angry youtuber says?

To be fair, Marcus Allen wasn't exactly an angry YouTuber. For decades he was the publisher of Nexus, a print magazine at the time. That said, Nexus is essentially a tabloid. It deals in "suppressed" news, "alternative" history, ancient mysteries, free energy, and the "unexplained." So yes, Allen was squarely biased toward the fantastic, the unexplainable, and the "What they don't want you to know" story.

But of course bias is a two-pronged test. Pointing out that someone might have a motive to distort the truth is one prong. Showing that they actually did distort the truth is the other prong. And that's frankly the only prong that matters. If people distort the truth, then they distorted the truth. You might be interested in why they did, and you might draw some conclusions about the character of people who would do that. But the skeptic is most properly interested only in whether the claim stands up, not the attendant inferences.

Allen's fans want to say he was putting NASA to the test. No, not really, because his tests are simply naked declarations of what he deems suspicious followed by unsupported accusations of what he thinks happened. Instead, I put Allen to the test. He failed. Different people will make different hay out of that failure. His fans will say he was unfairly maligned. His detractors say he got caught. But the salient fact is that he failed.

 

[JayUtah]

Did you do so while standing under a lit street lamp? Did you ever take a selfie with the night sky in the background that showed stars? Why are you resorting to bad-faith arguments to defend Allen?

The Ektachrome film used for lunar surface color photography was ISO 160, painfully slow by modern standards but quite suitable for daylight photography. It was considered fast film at the time. As we pointed out in the Artemis thread, the Nikon digital cameras used by the latest crew were set to ISO equivalents in the tens of thousands. ISO 160 film would take several minutes of shutter speed to get usable stars.

 

[JayUtah]

But that can't be correct, because VIxen didn't understand it, yet she claims to be a photographer...

I'm always amazed at this claim: "I'm a half-assed amateur photographer, and the crew that was contracted to fool the entirety of the human race was far more amateurish than me, like a senile granny trying to take a picture with a bottle of ketchup". The hubris is just breathtaking.

Belief in conspiracy theories is always about letting the believer pretend to be smarter than they actually are. It's a narrative about how powerful people did their best to cover something up, but the believer is way too smart to have been fooled. The purported conspirators have to be simultaneously very clever and very stupid.

Authorship of conspiracy theories is always about attracting a following, and sometimes, about being paid by those followers. Bart Sibrel made money by stalking astronauts and selling videos about it. Marcus Allen sold magazines to people who wanted to read sensational stories. "Wild Bill" Kaysing (the guy in the desert with all the cats) wanted to embarrass the government for its treatment of veterans. Ralph René (the guy with the leaf blower) wanted to sell a book, and spent the latter part of his life complaining about how later conspiracy theorists had stolen his material and his income.

None of these people is a serious journalist, investigator, or scientist. There's no genuine curiosity, just storytelling. The OP video is not the only mainstream professional documentary I participated in on this and similar subjects. After I got into that circle, I was absolutely shocked to see the overt level of masks-off backstabbing and gamesmanship among the prominent conspiracy theorists. None of them actually believes any of their own hype. They're all just vying for that limited audience of cranks.

I don't think it's fair that we have Jay here, I think he should be made to argue with one hand tied behind his back. Or both. And his legs. And only get to use his brain once a week. In the night-time. Still not fair, of course. Can someone get him drunk? And asleep?

Only if I get to choose the liquor.

All seriousness aside, someone as overtly fond of conspiracy theories as Vixen is was inevitably going to stumble over the one in which I'm a world-recognized expert. I did most of that work between 1995 and 2015, and I have mostly "retired" from it to concentrate on my family, business, and other things. But I'm still passionate about space history and the technology of Apollo. I was trained and mentored in my profession by actual Apollo engineers, some of whom are still alive and still practicing engineering.

 

[theprestige]

I've taken pics of the night sky. No problem in catching the stars.

So what's your hypothesis for why stars aren't visible some of the Apollo photographs?

 

[JayUtah]

Did you do so while standing under a lit street lamp?

I asked Ed Mitchell about this. Obviously the crews' eyes would be daylight-adjusted. While your iris responds in seconds to darkness, it takes your retina 30 seconds or more to adapt. Ed went into the shadow of the LM and stood there long enough (or so he thought) to adjust to the darkness. When he looked up he said he thought he could see some stars but he wasn't sure.

Mike Collins, on the other hand, had a whole hour in darkness on each orbit. The CM cabin lights were off. And under those conditions the starlight was reported to be very impressive.

 

[Mojo]

A lot of conspiracy theories seem to spring from the belief that highly qualified and experienced professionals don't know how to do their jobs, and need to be told how to do them by random bozos on the internet.

It's more that the conspiracy theorists are always the smartest person in the room, so if they couldn't do something then nobody could.

 

[Helen]

I don't get the whole "i can't understand how it's done, so it's a hoax" - If I looked at the world like that, I really wouldn't get much done. If I were left to my own devices, the world would confuse the hell out of me, so I happily rely on experts.

 

[JayUtah]

I don't get the whole "i can't understand how it's done, so it's a hoax"

It's rarely phrased like that. It's usually phrased as, "What they're claiming happened would be impossible." Then the debunking properly rephrases it as, "I don't understand how it was done," because that's really what the claim amounts to. The conspiracy theorist will rarely admit that the problem might be with their own understanding.

Then you need the additional premise. That's generally one or more of:

1. "...and I'm an expert."
2. "...and I'm generally a very smart person."
3. "...and it's common knowledge that <dubious claim>."
4. "...and I just looked up this simplistic discussion of it."
5. "...and I'm naturally disposed to a better, different way of thinking."
6. "...and I did this questionably probative demonstration."

Those are variously deployed by authors and believers, depending on whether the goal is to gain followers or to create an ego-reinforcing world. Trying to state the complaint as an objective fact deflects attention away from what their yardstick might be and what might be wrong with it.

 

[Matthew Best]

The OP of this thread is as asinine and ignorant as someone writing "Hey I saw a TV programme about water the other day, and it reminded me of the debate about homeopathy - I mean I know it perhaps sounds a little far-fetched, but loads of people say they were helped or even cured by it. What do people here think about it?"

OMG what are you doing????

DON'T GIVE HER IDEAS!!!

 

[Pixel42]

I don't get the whole "i can't understand how it's done, so it's a hoax" - If I looked at the world like that, I really wouldn't get much done. If I were left to my own devices, the world would confuse the hell out of me, so I happily rely on experts.

Other variations:

I can't understand how it was done, so it's aliens (e.g. the pyramids)
I can't explain it, so it's aliens (UFOs, UAP)
I can't understand it, so it's wrong (e.g. relativity, quantum theory)
I don't want to believe it, so I'll misrepresent it and pretend it makes no sense (e.g. evolution)
I want to believe it, so I'll never even look for, let alone at, any of the evidence against it (e.g. astrology, homeopathy)

 

[Thermal]

I don't get the whole "i can't understand how it's done, so it's a hoax" - If I looked at the world like that, I really wouldn't get much done. If I were left to my own devices, the world would confuse the hell out of me, so I happily rely on experts.

I think it's totally fair to question even the experts (if done with respect and all, obviously). Some conspiracy theories do seem to hold up (at first blush, anyway) to the implication that something, somewhere isn't adding up. So we question, and listen to the responses with the same open mind that we were willing to question them in the first place.

 

[Axxman300]

Sorry for introducing a link to factual information, but here's the link for Hasselblad:

Hasselblad in Space

www.hasselblad.com

To me these photographs are indicative of how NASA's team solved all the little problems. It was a good camera for the conditions, and for use with those gloves. And they caught so many iconic images. This was a time when cheap instamatic cameras were becoming popular, but most people still had Brownies (remember those?). I have a nice Canon 35mm DSLR that gets the job done, but I'm not a photographer. But I am smart enough to know you get what you pay for, and Hasselblad and Leica are the price of a used car, or new car. So, while I can talk about my experience with a low-end Canon DSLR, I am in no way qualified to discuss what any of the high-end cameras can do. And all the camera experts are in agreement with NASA on the Apollo photos, and that's enough for me.

 

[kookbreaker]

It's more that the conspiracy theorists are always the smartest person in the room, so if they couldn't do something then nobody could.

As I like to say: "Conspiracy theories are the opiates of the self-impressed".

 

[JayUtah]

I have a nice Canon 35mm DSLR that gets the job done, but I'm not a photographer.

A Canon DSLR will teach you enough about photography to understand any discussion about Apollo photography.

But I am smart enough to know you get what you pay for, and Hasselblad and Leica are the price of a used car, or new car.

I was fortunate as a college student to apprentice part-time with a professional photographer who had a whole stable of high-end medium- and large-format film cameras. Then as I become more involved with theater and film, I was privileged to learn more.

So, while I can talk about my experience with a low-end Canon DSLR, I am in no way qualified to discuss what any of the high-end cameras can do.

The same as a 35 mm SLR, just to a higher standard of quality. The lenses cost more, and do a better job of capturing the image without aberration or distortion. The film area is larger, so you get more grain in the picture. But other than that, it's just focal length, f-stop, and shutter speed. They don't work differently, just better.

While a professional fine art photographer can do wonders when they master their instrument, this was not required of Apollo. The shutter speed was set to 1/250 s and never changed. The f-stop was either f/5.6, f/8, or f/11. There was a diagram on the magazine that gave the proper f-stop for each direction relative to the sun. As I show in the video, you just had to push a paddle attached to the ring.

Focus was a technique called zone focusing. This was commonly used in photography until the advent of easy auto-focus technology. With the SLR (and with the unmodified Hasselblad 500/EL) you have a viewfinder to help you focus. You just turn the ring until the picture is sharp on the focusing screen. In zone focusing, you're using the fact that a high f-stops your depth of field is quite deep. You can experiment with this using your DSLR in manual mode. Thus your focus adjustment doesn't have to be spot-on. The Zeiss lenses had a detent—a "click" stop—at focus settings corresponding to different ranges that the astronauts could easily estimate. These zones overlapped so that you could be off by a little in your estimate.

On top of that, Neil Armstrong was already an avid photographer. In taking the "suspiciously perfect" picture of Aldrin, he knew that the recommended setting was near-distance focus and f/5.6, but he slightly overexposed the shot (as an experienced photographer knows to do when shooting up-sun). Aldrin was not an especially talented photographer, which is why Armstrong shot most of Roll 40.

 

[JesseCuster]

While a professional fine art photographer can do wonders when they master their instrument, this was not required of Apollo. The shutter speed was set to 1/250 s and never changed. The f-stop was either f/5.6, f/8, or f/11.

Vixen, given what you know about photography, do you think that camera settings of: 1/250s exposure, an aperture of f/5.6 to f/11 and an ISO of 160, would have "no problem in catching the stars"?

If you think that those settings Jay describe above, used by the Apollo astronauts, would have "no problem in catching the stars" then you don't know anything about how photography works.

On the flip side, how about you tell us the settings you might use for photographing the night sky, and then tell us that the following photograph wouldn't be horribly overexposed and blown-out with those settings.