Apollo 11 Moon Landing Revisited: Hoax ~vs~ Debunk

[JayUtah]

Who was it said that the moon landings were indeed filmed by Stanley Kubrik, who, to make it all look real, shot it all on location?

That was a joke post on USENET from many years ago. NASA supposedly hired Stanley Kubrick to shoot the fake lunar surface video, but he was so unsatisfied with the studio results that he demanded they shoot on location. A version of the joke without the punchline circulated for a while. I met with Kubrick's assistant Tony Frewin when he came for Sundance. He said Kubrick's office used to get regular phone calls and letters asking about it.

 

[jimbob]

People who didn't think the background looked real.

There is also the claim of 'fall off' by a professional photographer, Perry. For example, this pic here of Buzz Aldrin:

View attachment 71174

As you know, NASA claims the only light source was the sun but this 'fall off' indicates extra lighting by the way the background falls off, when one would expect the ground to show uniform brightness. Credit NASA AS11-40-5903

I think you missed what @Norman Alexander actually wrote. He was very precise in his choice of words.

Who was it said that the moon landings were indeed filmed by Stanley Kubrik, who, to make it all look real, shot it all on location?

 

[JayUtah]

Oh look @Vixen has posted an edited picture to support her lies....

69-HC-684 is absolutely an edited image. That ID number is for the print that you could order from NASA's photo distribution contractor. @Vixen's digital copy is also edited.

We know this because each adds some "headroom," dark sky above Aldrin's head. In the original framing of -5903, https://apollojournals.org/alsj/a11/AS11-40-5903.jpg , The top of Aldrin's OPS is actually slightly cut off. Obviously this is undesirable for editorial purposes, so editors routinely crop it and fix the layout problem.

I wonder if we now have to go through the whole "primary source" thing again...

Clearly we do, as Vixen is evidently very new to this long-debunked conspiracy theory.

This is as close as mere mortals are going to get to the originals.

Project Apollo Archive’s albums | Flickr

www.flickr.com

Note that there are two versions of Roll 40, one that's the raw scan and another where image levels have been adjusted. The "washed out" raw scans are not meant to look pretty. They're meant to use contrast contraction to preserve detail in highlights and shadows.

 

[JayUtah]

So the provenance of your version has a number of guesses. Despite your insinuation that NASA has doctored it later I don't think you have any good reason to think so.

NASA and everyone else "doctors" photos they put up on web sites for editorial or public relations purposes. Only a great idiot would download a digital picture from a second, third, or nth-generation convenience source and pretend that you can do whatever photographic analysis you want to it and extract any meaningful results.

My first observation is that your version has higher contrast, and increasing contrast is like the entropy of photographs: The more times they get copied, the more contrast increases.

Correct. I said as much above, but having now read your post and others more carefully, I should give you credit for saying it first. I was frankly astonished at how much gradient was lost between the camera originals and the dupe masters. I need to renew my efforts to locate my scans.

So the version JesseCuster posted is very, very unlikely to be derived from the version you posted. It looks to me much more likely to be closer to the original.

Here's the unadjusted scan of a first-generation dupe master. There's little if any falloff.

https://flic.kr/p/zD2hCx

 

[Vixen]

Surely you mean Percy, the "professional photographer" who was too scared to come on the show to defend his claim.


The only direct light source is the sun. However, David Percy proved himself to be utterly incompetent when it came to indirect light sources, texture hiding, and all the other important concepts that come into play when you actually practice photography.


You must be new to this.

The claim is that falloff is the product of using only one light, which wouldn't be able to illuminate the entire ground surface. You would add extra lighting to get rid of the falloff, what lighting designers call a "wash." But then you have multiple shadows.

If you had watched the video you posted, you would have seen the actual effect of using only one light to try to illuminate a large area.


Why would one expect that?


Originally, yes. But the Apollo photographs have been widely duplicated by both photographic and digital means. NASA made a set of dupe masters from the original transparencies and then keep the camera originals in a vault. NASA turned the dupe masters over to a commercial photo service, which handled photo requests for decades until some of the dupe masters (and in other cases, prints made from them) were scanned by whoever had them and put on the web. All the pictures you will ever see are scans of at least a second-generation dupe.

The GUARDIAN credits the photo to NASA.

The greatest photos ever? Why the moon landing shots are artistic masterpieces | Photography | The Guardian https://share.google/nNLwAfIS4A6R2Pgaz

 

[JayUtah]

So @Vixen, are you going to tell us your camera settings for your "night sky" photography that you accomplished so effortlessly? Film/sensor ISO? Shutter speed? Aperture?

Conversely are you going to favor us with your preferred explanation for why there are no stars in the Apollo photos?

 

[JayUtah]

The GUARDIAN credits the photo to NASA.

Asked and answered.

 

[Andy_Ross]

People who didn't think the background looked real.

There is also the claim of 'fall off' by a professional photographer, Perry. For example, this pic here of Buzz Aldrin:

View attachment 71174

As you know, NASA claims the only light source was the sun but this 'fall off' indicates extra lighting by the way the background falls off, when one would expect the ground to show uniform brightness. Credit NASA AS11-40-5903

What is your evidence for extra light?

 

[Vixen]

Asked and answered.

So in other words it hasn't been doctored by anyone

 

[JayUtah]

So in other words...

Deal with my actual answers, not the words you're trying to shove in my mouth.

 

[JayUtah]

Also, the apparent "fall off" tends in the wrong direction.

It gets worse.

On a level textured sunlit surface you can expect to see some degree of up-sun falloff. That's because that's where the texture hiding is minimized. Looking down-sun you should expect it to be bright all the way to the horizon because that's where texture hiding is at its greatest. It's at its maximum value at a zero phase angle.

If you get a high-resolution scan of -5903 and zoom in on the reflection in Aldrin's visor, you can see exactly this effect. The reflection is essentially what Aldrin was seeing when the photo was taken. At the tip of Aldrin's shadow the phase angle is zero and the lunar surface appears very bright all the way to the horizon and uniformly left and right. This is expected due to the texture-hiding effect and uniform sunlight.

Conversely, when you have a single point light source so as to create a single hard-edged shadow, you get falloff the farther you are from the light source. This is just basic radiation, which necessarily obeys an inverse power law. This is what we demonstrated in the desert. You also get massive falloff left and right from your lighting axis. For photography purposes this limits you to a small area of your set where you have both unidirectional light and even illumination. But in -5903 (especially in the reflection) you get full left-and-right illumination.

 

[JayUtah]

What is your evidence for extra light?

Let's not forget that she got both the argument and its author's name wrong.

"Falloff means there was extra lights," is backwards. It's either, "Falloff means there was only one light," or "Achieving a lack of falloff would have required extra lights." Both claims are made by various people, but Vixen clearly doesn't actually grasp what is actually being alleged. It's cargo-cult reasoning.

The OP linked video is the U.K. version of our program. The American version had an American narrator and interviewed American physicists and scientists (e.g., James Oberg). The idea was that they would be names each audience recognized. The U.K. version cites spill from the lunar module as one possible source of unexpected brightness. Indeed, if you artificially amplify the saturation, you can see evidence of orange spill on Aldrin's space suit. It's orange because of the Kapton film covering the nearby portion of the LM. This is one reason to expect locally greater surface illumination.

Here's a still I shot on location that illustrates a similar spill effect from the space suit.



Another thing to consider is texture and color variation. The astronauts noted (and subsequent photography bears this out) that the regolith they stirred up by walking was darker than the surface layer. In the foreground of -5903 you can see plenty of evidence of this stirring up. The material in front of Aldrin is just physically darker. Further, texture variation when the phase angle approaches 180º manifests itself in apparent brightness. The stirred up portion in front of Aldrin will likely have more texture than the patch behind Adrin. In any case, the surface is not uniformly textured, nor expected to be. In this case, the bright patch behind Aldrin corresponds to the surface swept smooth by the descent engine during Eagle's landing.

 

[Andy_Ross]

Yes, but who filmed Armstrong coming down the ladder?

And what about the cameraman that filmed the LM take off from the surface?

How did Nixon speak to them on the telephone?

Anything else to pre-empt?

 

[P.J. Denyer]

Yes, but who filmed Armstrong coming down the ladder?

And what about the cameraman that filmed the LM take off from the surface?

How did Nixon speak to them on the telephone?

Anything else to pre-empt?

Doctor Manhatten

Doctor Manhatten (I saw a documentary on it)

A really, really long curley phone lead, obvs.

 

[JayUtah]

All debunked decades ago. Answers are out there for anybody to look up. But since our resident conspiracy theorist has just now stumbled onto it, somehow all those questions matter again.

 

[Safe-Keeper]

The classic CTer mindset. Not 'hmm, that's weird, I gotta google this and see why it's like this', but 'hmmm, that's weird, gotta be a conspiracy'.

 

[Jack by the hedge]

So in other words it hasn't been doctored by anyone

I'm content to go with my original wording; it looks like it's been deliberately dodged, compared to a lower-contrast version which will be closer to the original. I'm also content to accept an explanation that the effect is not necessarily deliberate.

You're surely aware that innumerable Apollo hoax claims have been debunked over and over in the decades since the missions. Many of them on this forum. What do you hope to gain from regurgitating a bunch of them afresh? Do you want to put people to the test and see if they will jump through hoops for you?

 

[GlennB]

All debunked decades ago. Answers are out there for anybody to look up. But since our resident conspiracy theorist has just now stumbled onto it, somehow all those questions matter again.

'Twas ever thus with Vixen.

 

[Thermal]

I'm content to go with my original wording; it looks like it's been deliberately dodged, compared to a lower-contrast version which will be closer to the original. I'm also content to accept an explanation that the effect is not necessarily deliberate.

You're surely aware that innumerable Apollo hoax claims have been debunked over and over in the decades since the missions. Many of them on this forum. What do you hope to gain from regurgitating a bunch of them afresh? Do you want to put people to the test and see if they will jump through hoops for you?

Just Asking Questions, surely? I mean, when I ask questions whose answer can only be either 1) it was faked, or 2) I don't know what the ◊◊◊◊ I am talking about, I expect a pass for being innocently inquisitive and more observant than the average bear.

 

[Mojo]

Oh for goodness sake, how many times does this have to be debunked?

N+1.