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Apollo 11 Moon Landing Revisited: Hoax ~vs~ Debunk

Thermal said:
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.
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Hey, if you can't get 'good' attention...
 
Andy_Ross said:
I'm surprised it hasn't already been mentioned.

This is the place to get all your Apollo questions answered.

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There's one question not answered, there, I think: How, in the 21st century, can a person with intelligence greater than or equal to a poodle, seriously doubt the achievements of the Apollo Program?
 
Jack by the hedge said:
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.
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The image @Vixen posted was undoubtedly doctored to make it look better. I explained how it was doctored and how we can know it was doctored. It was cropped and reframed to center Aldrin in the composition. And when we compare it to known scans from known first-generation dupes and camera originals, we can easily see the evidence of image density alteration, either intentional or inadvertent. "Doctored" means intentionally modified, and in some cases we can say it also implies nefarious intent. Here the intent is far from nefarious: People have been tweaking -5903 from Day One for legitimate editorial purposes. The December 1969 issue of National Geographic (which I own) uses -5903 as its cover photo—reframed and made darker in parts so that the white text shows up better.

Vixen seems to be laboring under at least two false premises. First, she seems to think it's possible to copy or scan a photograph without introducing any elements of infidelity. That's simply not possible. The dupe masters were carefully prepared, to be sure. But you can't take a photo of a photo without losing detail and midtones. Thus if two multi-generation copies of a photo exist, you can't definitively say that one is necessarily more faithful to the original than the other if they should appear to differ. The only way to know for sure is to compare them to copies of known provenance.

Second, she seems to think that because The Guardian credited the photo to "NASA" and gave its photo ID number, that this means there is one, singular, authoritative source at NASA for Apollo photography. That is absolutely untrue. The only official source at NASA is the Apollo Image Atlas at the Lunar and Planetary Institute. Frankly, they're garbage. Here's -5903 there: https://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/apollo/frame/?AS11-40-5903 . Notice how it's a low-resolution scan with poor contrast and a plethora of DCT compression artifacts. No serious editor would consider that for publication.

The Apollo Lunar Surface Journal used to have a good collection, and they were hosted at NASA for a while. But it was always a private project which has now been moved to its own domain.

This site https://apolloarchive.com/apollo_gallery.html has medium-resolution scans of the camera originals. They're high enough resolution for editorial purposes, but for image analysis you really need to scan at film-grain resolution or higher: 4000-8000 dpi. I won't link directly to -5903 because I suspect the forum software will try to drag in a huge file. You can click your way to the high-resolution image. Here's the low-res scan of the camera original: https://apollojournals.org/alsj/a11/AS11-40-5903.jpg .

This is where the majority of us get our good copies of Apollo photos. Yes, it's still appropriate to credit them to NASA, who authored them, and it's still appropriate to identify them by number. But the best, most authoritative sources are third-party sources who did all this with NASA's permission. Eric Jones and Kip Teague did a lot of this work on their own, but through their access to NASA.

Vixen is determined to have us believe that her unknown version from The Guardian is the one and only true depiction of the relative brightness of the lunar surface because of what she's naively inferred from the photo credit.
 
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Thermal said:
There's one question not answered, there, I think: How, in the 21st century, can a person with intelligence greater than or equal to a poodle, seriously doubt the achievements of the Apollo Program?
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The most common reason for an apparent paradox is that you've introduced an unwarranted assumption into your scenario. I offer this only as a general observation.
 
Thermal said:
There's one question not answered, there, I think: How, in the 21st century, can a person with intelligence greater than or equal to a poodle, seriously doubt the achievements of the Apollo Program?
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Willful ignorance. There are simply people in the world who prefer a conspiracy-oriented view of it, often for no better reason than to convince themselves they're so very smart for having seen through the "deception." They will ignore whatever they have to and parrot whatever nonsense they hear in order to make that illusion real for themselves. Consequently there are a lot of people who will cater to that interest and misrepresent whatever they have to and author whatever nonsense they have to in order to get and hold those people's attention—and often as much of their money as they can.

Yes, there really are people who wonder "Who filmed Armstrong coming down the ladder?" or "Who filmed the lunar liftoff?" as if unmanned, remote control television cameras weren't a thing already in the 1960s. It's like some people just turn of large parts of their brains when they imagine everything that's "wrong" with the Apollo evidence and pat themselves on the back for their cleverness. It's not just that these questions have answers, it's that the questions themselves are often moronic beyond belief, just on their face.

If you want to talk television, talk about taking video in the shadow of the LM. That's a legitimately titillating topic because Westinghouse actually got the Defense Department's permission to use the low-light television pickup tube it was developing for DOD to use in Vietnam for surveillance. The people who worked on the camera needed security clearances and much of the documentation was "eyes-only." When the camera was removed from the pop-out mount and carried out on its tripod to record the rest of the mission, it had to be fitted with a separate f/50 aperture lens so that it wouldn't be blown out by full sunlight.

Something like that is a legitimate question because (a) it stems from what appears to be a genuine anomaly, and (b) it has an answer that you really have to dig for and would have been hard for someone in the 1970s to discover. Nowadays it has all been declassified and written about in Dwight Steven-Boniecki's excellent book Live TV From the Moon. Known to many of us for years, Dwight interviewed many of the original engineers who worked on the cameras.
 
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I imported into Lightroom, the 3 versions of 5903 posted on this thread, the version I posted, the version Vixen posted and the high resolution scan Jay posted.

Vixen's version, as I suspected from looking at it, has clipping in the highlights that aren't present in the other versions, so it cannot be the version from which the others were then created by doctoring them. If you've got clipped highlights, there's no amount of editing, doctoring, lightening, "increasing the dpi", etc. to recover those highlights. There's simply no way to get from the Guardian version to the other versions by altering the brightness, contrast, etc.
 
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JesseCuster said:
Vixen's version, as I suspect from looking at it, has clipping in the highlights that aren't present in the other versions...
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Very common in multi-generation copies of these photos. Midtones are easily lost, especially at the relatively bright and relatively dark ends of the scale. That means highlights get blown out and detail in them is lost.

JesseCuster said:
If you've got clipped highlights, there's no amount of editing, doctoring, lightening, "increasing the dpi", etc. to recover those highlights.
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Blown-out or blocked-out detail in either highlights or shadows represents lost data. You can't go from that back to a condition of un-lost data.

This is why the raw scan data exists for some important rolls like Roll 40 even though it looks paradoxically washed out. It captures the full dynamic range of the film. These scans lack true blacks and true whites because they fit all the image density information into the scanner's grayscale gamut, leaving a margin to ensure against any sort of data clipping.
 
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Andy_Ross said:
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?
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How can the landing site still be there when I see the moon go away and come back on the regular?

How come Jay Utah could photograph an astronaut on the Moon 'on location' without a space suit and without a space ship to take him there?

If Apollo 11 did it first, why was there no pushback from NASA when Michael Jackson said he invented the moonwalk?
 
Gawdzilla Sama said:
Nice shot of the contact probe upstream a few pages.
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In this case it's how we know the bright (probably smooth) patch behind Aldrin was swept by the DPS plume. The direction in which the probes are bent points back in the direction from which the LM came during its last two meters of descent. You recall Aldrin saying, "Drifting to the right a little." In fact, Armstrong had responded to this and was overcorrecting to his left when Eagle touched down—with a pronounced lateral motion to the left that Armstrong said later he wasn't proud of. More evidence of the sweeping can be seen better in images such as -5920.

The Apollo 11 photo plan called for a lot of photography of the LM to ascertain its post-landing condition, and of the surface beneath it to ascertain plume effects. Much of what Marcus Allen wanted to dismiss as uninteresting or undramatic photographs come from these documentary photos. Then at the end of the roll, since the magazine lacked the usual darkslide, the astronaut was supposed to fire off three or four last frames that would be considered sacrificial. The first few frames were also considered sacrificial. Roll 40 is sunstruck and the end but not at the beginning because it was preloaded onto the camera body.

I can see why people might agree with Allen in the opinion that Roll 40 contains a lot of boring, editorially uninteresting photos. That's just a difference of expectation. Yes, certainly the high-resolution color photography was expected to capture public attention. But Apollo 11 was still classified as a test flight, and there was quite a lot to evaluate from the first landing. So a lot of the 70 mm color photography was allocated to photographing things the engineers needed to know about how their ship had fared and whether their assumptions had held true.
 
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Safe-Keeper said:
How come Jay Utah could photograph an astronaut on the Moon 'on location' without a space suit and without a space ship to take him there?

If Apollo 11 did it first, why was there no pushback from NASA when Michael Jackson said he invented the moonwalk?
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Jay is actually Dr Manhatten

If it was the first one, why's it called 'Eleven' huh? Huh? Stranger Things was sending us a coded message!
 
Safe-Keeper said:
How come Jay Utah could photograph an astronaut on the Moon 'on location' without a space suit and without a space ship to take him there?
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Another funny story. The road from Los Angeles out to the Trona Pinnacles takes you past Edwards AFB and a few other notable landmarks including Vasquez Rocks. Now any Star Trek fan worth his tricorder can tell you why Vasquez Rocks is important. It's that very distinctive slanted rock formation that appears in so many episodes of so many Star Trek series. It's a convenient distance from Hollywood and looks alien enough. There was a serious suggestion that we should stop and film some of the program there just as an inside joke.
 
JayUtah said:
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.
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Kubrick used some f/0.7 lenses made specially by Zeiss for NASA for the Apollo missions, for shooting some of the scenes in Barry Lyndon (I think he wanted to shoot some interior scenes without using any artificial or studio lighting and needed a super-fast lens). I've heard it argued that he was able to get his hands on the lenses because he had contacts inside NASA from when he shot the moon landing for them.
 
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Thermal said:
There's one question not answered, there, I think: How, in the 21st century, can a person with intelligence greater than or equal to a poodle, seriously doubt the achievements of the Apollo Program?
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Excuse me but I must butt in on behalf of poodles, a much denigrated dog breed. In my experience Standard Poodles are intelligent dogs (well l, with one exception), well mannered and eminently trainable.
 
Thermal said:
This is the kind of thread that pays off. A ridiculous premise that only deserves to be mocked, and it turns into an interesting dive into the details of how the sausage gets photographed in space.
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Damn right.
 
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