The book, not the film. The film was just fluff, no beef. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25953369-hidden-figures
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Apollo 11 Moon Landing Revisited: Hoax ~vs~ Debunk
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Mojo
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Foster Zygote
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Then you must know that you can't just point an SLR camera with the aperture set to either f-5.6, f-8 or f-11, and exposure settings of either 1/250 or 1/125 and take photos of the stars, no matter how dark and clear the night sky is. I've also photographed stars - when I worked at a planetarium back in the early '90s, and we did a class on photographing the night sky for amateur photographers/astronomers. I know how I did it, so I'm curious to know how you did it.
The reason the debunks of Allen's "queries" aren't deeply technical and complicated is because the "problems" he thinks he's pointing out are based on a fundamental misapprehension of the most basic aspects of photography.
- The lack of stars is easily explained by the fact that the cameras used were set to take photos of objects and terrain in bright sunlight, so they couldn't image stars.
- The claim that the shadows should all appear parallel in the images is easily proved false by showing the shadows of objects on an irregular surface in direct sunlight.
- The "multiple light sources" claim regarding the aforementioned shadows is easily disproved by pointing out that two light sources would produce two diverging shadows from each object.
In short, the reason the answers to his questions are at a preschool level of depth regarding the rich and complicated subject of photography is because that's where his questions, and his understanding of the subject, were firmly situated. If someone is upset his computer doesn't work, he isn't justified in saying his intelligence is being insulted if the IT guy says, "well first you need to plug it into the power outlet".
Foster Zygote
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When I was working at the planetarium, I was quite proud of a photo I took of the Pleiades. It was taken with a 35 mm SLR (it was either a Nikon or a Canon, I can't remember which) attached to an 8" Celestron reflector. I used the motorized equatorial mount to track it, set the shutter to bulb, and exposed it for about 15 minutes (again, details are lost to the fog of deep time).
Foster Zygote
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It's also worth noting that Apollo 16 did take images of astronomical subjects with the Far Ultraviolet Camera/Spectrograph, which provided novel scientific data.
I've heard some conspiracy theorists express the belief that the stars seen from the lunar surface would be so bright that they should have brought instruments to record never before seen images. But the fact is that the earth's atmosphere on a clear night, even at sea level, only blocks about 2% of visible light. The difference in apparent brightness between the stars seen from the lunar surface (or just in space) would be indiscernible from what you'd see on a clear night at a mountaintop observatory. Any instrument that could have fit in one of the LM quadrants would have been too small to come remotely close to what even a modest ground based telescope could do.
But earth's atmosphere is opaque to the far ultraviolet. By taking the Far Ultraviolet Camera/Spectrograph to the moon, the Apollo 16 crew was able to image phenomena that had never been seen before.
I've heard some conspiracy theorists express the belief that the stars seen from the lunar surface would be so bright that they should have brought instruments to record never before seen images. But the fact is that the earth's atmosphere on a clear night, even at sea level, only blocks about 2% of visible light. The difference in apparent brightness between the stars seen from the lunar surface (or just in space) would be indiscernible from what you'd see on a clear night at a mountaintop observatory. Any instrument that could have fit in one of the LM quadrants would have been too small to come remotely close to what even a modest ground based telescope could do.
But earth's atmosphere is opaque to the far ultraviolet. By taking the Far Ultraviolet Camera/Spectrograph to the moon, the Apollo 16 crew was able to image phenomena that had never been seen before.
Andy_Ross
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Another story is that the stars viewed from the moon would be in different positions compared to viewing them from earth. They had to leave them out because they weren't able to calculate all the new positions and people would have noticed if they were wrong.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Only by a negligible amount and only for a few of the nearest stars for which the parallax baseline is significant.
Yeah, think about that for a minute. People could see that the stars were in the wrong places, but also people couldn't know where the stars should have been in order to put them there.
Bill Kaysing is responsible for that head-banging bit of illogic.
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EHocking
Penultimate Amazing
Most people will a. not believe and/or b. not understand the explanation that the moon appears to be “upside down” when viewed in the S.hemisphere compared to when viewed in the northern.
So yeah, I can see how a slight shift in star position would warp their fragile little minds.
So yeah, I can see how a slight shift in star position would warp their fragile little minds.
Foster Zygote
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Sadly, that sort of inability to comprehend scale isn't uncommon among conspiracy theorists.
A variant I've seen is the claim that they omitted the stars because they knew they'd never be able to place them perfectly enough to fool astronomers. The funny thing is that if stars were supposed to be visible, they would have been about the easiest thing to fake. And they'd even fool astronomers because they would be images of the actual stars. They just needed to take a catalog of star images using the same cameras. They could have done it from mountaintops over the course of a year. Then they'd have a mosaic of the entire celestial sphere, with images that could be composited into the lovely black sky of all the Apollo photos.
Reformed Offlian
Illuminator
Right, because of all the other people NASA would have had to involve in faking the moon landings, they couldn't just hire an astronomer to do a moon-centered star chart for them. And they couldn't possibly have come up with an innocent explanation for why they might want such a chart if they did.
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Foster Zygote
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Another thing that occurs to me is that, if the parallax really changed that much between the earth and the moon, it would make it impossible to use the sextant to feed location data to the AGC.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
To keep astronomers from blowing the whistle on wrongly placed stars in photos, NASA just left out the stars. And naturally astronomers weren't tipped off by the lack of stars. "Hey, the stars are in the wrong place," presumes that astronomers would expect to see stars in the photos at all. You don't see the astronomical community massively wondering why there are no stars in the photos. And that's because they know what it takes to photograph stars.
It's one thing for Bill "Cat Lady" Kaysing to make such a claim. He has no qualifications in photography. It's entirely another thing for self-proclaimed professional photographers like Marcus Allen and David Percy to make this claim. The answer is basic photography, the thing you learn on Day One of photo school. This is how we know these people are not genuinely curious and not interested in truth. You can't be even an accomplished amateur photographer and claim stars should be visible under daylight exposure settings. It's a deliberate lie on the part of people trying to sell you something.
Gord_in_Toronto
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JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
If people think the parallax would change dramatically across 384,000 km between Earth and Moon, wait until they realize that the parallax changes 300,000,000 km from April to October as Earth moves through its orbit.
The notion that these people are just "curious" or are bothered by "inconsistencies" and are doing a public service by trying to hold powerful interests to account falls down so very quickly when you realize that the answers to their questions are easily within the grasp of any person of ordinary intelligence and resources. And in the case of the alleged parallax, within the grasp of a moment's thought. Curious people find answers; they don't just ruminate endlessly over questions. Journalists (such as Allen claimed to be) are adept at finding even hard answers. Allen could have easily found answers to his pressing questions by a single phone call.
But he didn't. And that's the best evidence that he's not interested in the answers to his questions. He wants the questions to hang there as some kind of totem of unanswered riddles that he has posed—because that's what his magazine sold. He demands that NASA owes him answers while ignoring the answers that were there all along within easy reach. It's just lying. There's no honor in it. Allen doesn't deserve a parade. He deserves all the more mockery for his deliberate misrepresentations.
David Percy didn't even have the balls to appear on the video. He was invited, but he declined. Then afterward he posted a diatribe on his web site about how the program didn't address this or that. Percy is a consummate coward. He only spoke out when he 100% controlled the narrative.
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Reformed Offlian
Illuminator
It doesn't. As JayUtah alluded to, the parallax due to the earth's annual motion is orders of magnitude larger, and yet it is not observable without instruments.
grunion
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I must concur. I flew Aeroflot from London to Moscow in 1973 and in mid-flight dirtywater started dripping from the air ducts and kept up at a steady rate for the duration. But that doesn’t speak to their level of technology (Apollo-Soyuz link was the big detente mission while I was visiting, a very impressive feat at the time considering the Cold War atmosphere) but more to their priorities.
That's the one, thanks
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Mojo
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We used to have a forum member who couldn't understand that if the northern hemisphere turns anticlockwise then the southern hemisphere turns clockwise.
Jack by the hedge
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I suppose the proponents were some form of flat-earther. They couldn't have been heliocentrists as they'd have had to account for the earth moving several moon-distances around its orbit from one night to the next.