Apollo 11 Moon Landing Revisited: Hoax ~vs~ Debunk

[Thermal]

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.

Agreed. I've had two mixes (Shnoodles), one of which spoke at least three Latin based languages fluently, and a smattering of pleasantries and commands in Japanese and Korean. Also a Bichon poodle that sadly is the dumbest thing on four legs I've ever borne witness to, and appears to have lingering questions about shadows in the Apollo pics.

 

[kookbreaker]

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.

Aren't those rocks used a lot because they are in the infamous "Thirty Mile Zone (TMZ)"?

 

[Ranb]

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

You should be using an unaltered version of the photo if you want to question it. This iconic photo was poorly framed by Armstrong and is usually cropped, or in the case of your version, a black bar is added to the top.

Apollo 11 Image Library

https://www.apollojournals.org/alsj/a11/AS11-40-5903.jpg

ETA; Jay beat me to it.

 

[Reformed Offlian]

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.

There's simply no other possible explanation for how a world-famous director could have had friends in the camera-making industry.

 

[Foster Zygote]

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.

If the parallax between earth and moon would be obvious, then the parallax of earth's orbit around the sun should radically alter the appearance of the constellations every six months. But in reality, ifyou reduce one AU to one foot, then the radius of the moon's orbit would be about 0.03", and Proxima Centauri would be 52 miles away. So...

 

[Thermal]

...Vixen seems to be laboring under at least two false premises...

We should take a moment to acknowledge the restraint here.

 

[JayUtah]

Aren't those rocks used a lot because they are in the infamous "Thirty Mile Zone (TMZ)"?

They are used a lot, especially in old Westerns. They're iconic. I emphasize Star Trek because as soon as you see Vasquez Rocks in a Star Trek episode, you say to yourself, "Ah, we're on an alien planet." Since we were trying to recreate an alien planet (albeit just our own moon), it seemed a reasonable suggestion.

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.

It may be argued, but it's slightly wrong. Kubrick had contacts at Zeiss. The Zeiss Planar 50 mm f/0.7 lens was commissioned by NASA, to be sure, but they weren't actually used, for various reasons. The Zeiss Biogon 60 mm f/5.6 turned out to be a fast enough lens for both lunar surface and orbital photography.

In any case, the production run for the Planar was only 10 units because they weren't considered viable for commercial sale. The NASA contract was for six units. Zeiss produced the extras for their own internal use, and as spares in case any of the six contracted lenses failed. Three of the four lenses that NASA never asked for were sold to Kubrick because they were just laying around on a shelf at Zeiss.

 

[Foster Zygote]

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

David Percy is a lying sack of ◊◊◊◊ and this 4½ minute video proves it.


Percy also showed a bit of RCA GCTA video showing one of the J-Mission astronauts hopping on the moon, then he sped it up to what he claimed was the "original speed" and says it looks just like someone jumping in earth gravity. And it does look like it could be someone moving in 1g - for that couple second clip he showed. But someone else took the original TV video that clip is taken from and sped up a much longer part of it by the same rate as Percy, and it's undeniably clear that it can't be normal movement in earth gravity, as it looks as unnatural as any other video of people moving about at a much faster than normal playback speed.

There's no way in Hell he didn't deliberately edit those TV broadcasts to fit a narrative that he knows is a lie. He's a grifter who, like Sibrel, figured out he could earn a decent profit by selling ◊◊◊◊ sandwiches as long as he labeled them "FOR SMART PEOPLE ONLY!".

Edited by Agatha: 

Edited to fix greyed out text

 

[JayUtah]

If the parallax between earth and moon would be obvious, then the parallax of earth's orbit around the sun should radically alter the appearance of the constellations every six months.

To be sure, not all the hoax claimants are as astronomically challenged (read that however you will) as Bill Kaysing. That is, not all of them claimed the stars would look different. But many do claim there were just too many of them to get right and therefore someone would notice if any of them were wrong. This, of course, would come as a great surprise to the makers of planetarium instruments.

 

[Trebuchet]

David Percy is a lying sack of ◊◊◊◊ and this 4½ minute video proves it.


Percy also showed a bit of RCA GCTA video showing one of the J-Mission astronauts hopping on the moon, then he sped it up to what he claimed was the "original speed" and says it looks just like someone jumping in earth gravity. And it does look like it could be someone moving in 1g - for that couple second clip he showed. But someone else took the original TV video that clip is taken from and sped up a much longer part of it by the same rate as Percy, and it's undeniably clear that it can't be normal movement in earth gravity, as it looks as unnatural as any other video of people moving about at a much faster than normal playback speed.

There's no way in Hell he didn't deliberately edit those TV broadcasts to fit a narrative that he knows is a lie. He's a grifter who, like Sibrel, figured out he could earn a decent profit by selling ◊◊◊◊ sandwiches as long as he labeled them "FOR SMART PEOPLE ONLY!".

OMG. I made the mistake of looking at the comments on that. Now I'll have to drink more wine.

 

[JayUtah]

There's no way in Hell he didn't deliberately edit those TV broadcasts to fit a narrative that he knows is a lie.

David Percy absolutely edits his evidence dishonestly. That's only one of countless examples people have come up with, and quite probably why he never set foot outside the walled garden of his own media. Although I don't post to YouTube, there are quite a number of YouTubers who have effectively debunked his claims in video format. Percy's web site used to have a discussion forum which he shut down after getting absolutely roasted by critics, including me.

My favorite personal story is challenging him on the notion that the sun's rays are parallel and therefore must always look parallel in photos. In the book he wrote with Mary Bennett, he tries to illustrate this by drawing lines on some ordinary Earth photos (p. 22). Deceptively, he actually covers up the actual shadow in the photo with his illustrative line so that you can't see for yourself where the shadow actually falls. In contrast, he draws lines on Apollo photographs to show that the shadows aren't parallel as "expected." Then on page 27, he's trying to illustrate the problems with photographing the shaded side of objects, and the example he uses clearly has dramatically converging light rays. I asked him about that on his discussion board and he removed the post as "impolite," as I recall. (This was all 20 years ago.)

Percy claims these non-parallel shadows are evidence of multiple light sources. But of course he won't demonstrate his claim using an actual lighting setup, because overlapping the fields to produce the uniform wash will produce multiple shadows per object. And this has been demonstrated for him countless times. That's why all he does is draw things on photos or edit the photos to show you what he insists would be the case. Now there is a technique in photogrammetry that you can use to determine whether different shadows were cast by the same light source. Percy hasn't a single clue how to do it. But I do, and when I do it (on photos where the data allows this), I find that they come from the same light source.

When you read the first fifty pages or so of his book, or sit through the first hour of his nearly four-hour hoax rant on video, you come away with the impression that David Percy wouldn't know a camera if one fell on his head. What he cites as intractable "problems" in Apollo photography that he says throw doubt on its authenticity (such as being able to see the shaded sides of things) are instead basic techniques. I learned in high school how you get fill light from nearby happenstance surfaces and how to properly expose shade and shadow. Either Percy would flunk Photo 101 or he's ignoring the obvious answers in order to sell his book and video. (And yes, Percy claims that in order to fully understand his claims you have to buy both his book and video.)

Another great part is where he "proves" the film would have broken down in the high temperature of the lunar day—by baking it in an oven!

 

[junkshop]

OMG. I made the mistake of looking at the comments on that. Now I'll have to drink more wine.

Thank you. I now know that I should definitely not look at the comments.

 

[Vixen]

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.

Cropping a photo is 'editing' not 'doctoring', as in intent to deceive. The GUARDIAN pic is the ORIGINAL one, issued by NASA and reproduced in newspapers all over the world. (-5903). As of 1969. Only NASA had the rights. This is factual. Then in 2004 came the DOCTORED version - by NASA - (-684) bleaching out the 'fall off' area, and also having the effect of making Buzz look less sharp. This is cold objective fact and nothing at all to do with opinion or 'theory', conspiracy or otherwise, it just is.

 

[junkshop]

Cropping a photo is 'editing' not 'doctoring', as in intent to deceive. The GUARDIAN pic is the ORIGINAL one, issued by NASA and reproduced in newspapers all over the world. (-5903). As of 1969. Only NASA had the rights. This is factual. Then in 2004 came the DOCTORED version - by NASA - (-684) bleaching out the 'fall off' area, and also having the effect of making Buzz look less sharp. This is cold objective fact and nothing at all to do with opinion or 'theory', conspiracy or otherwise, it just is.

It just isn't.

 

[JayUtah]

Cropping a photo is 'editing' not 'doctoring', as in intent to deceive.

Irrelevant. Your photo was cropped, reframed, and level-adjusted. It is by no means the original form.

The GUARDIAN pic is the ORIGINAL one, issued by NASA and reproduced in newspapers all over the world.

No, it isn't. You haven't paid one bit of attention to anything I've written.

Only NASA had the rights.

Actually photos produced by NASA are in the pubic domain.

This is factual.

No, you have absolutely no correct grasp of the facts.

Then in 2004 came the DOCTORED version - by NASA - (-684) bleaching out the 'fall off' area, and also having the effect of making Buzz look less sharp. This is cold objective fact and nothing at all to do with opinion or 'theory', conspiracy or otherwise, it just is.

No, it's something you're making up.

The Guardian didn't publish its picture in 1969. It published it in 2019, using one of the high-resolution versions that you can download from any of several excellent private sources, royalty free—but not from NASA. NASA has only crappy, low-resolution scans on their official site. Somewhere along the line, Guardian's download was altered in the way I've described, and in the way it has been altered many times by many people. This includes cropping and reframing to make the composition look less awkward. This includes level-adjusting for visual appeal, for example. And it includes quantizing for web delivery, which reduces the file size but decreases fidelity.

That you are unwilling to realize all this has happened to your one preferred copy of the photo does not entitle you to stamp your feet and demand that the debate is over because you say so.

You have been show an archival scan of the camera original that does not display the falloff effect. You have been shown scans of a first-generation dupe master. You have been shown raw scan data that guarantees no clipping or blocking. You have had a process described to you whereby you can know that the more even image cannot have been created from the Guardian image because it contains data from the original that the Guardian photo does not. Yet despite all this high-quality primary evidence, you still maintain that the one example of -5903 that you found—likely on the first site that came up in your web search—is somehow the definitive, authoritative representation of the relative brightness of the surfaces in the image.

No.

 

[Andy_Ross]

You might as well talk to the wall.

Sometimes I wish we had the old Bad Astronomy rules for threads like this.
That was a good time to be a Mod.

 

[JayUtah]

The GUARDIAN pic is the ORIGINAL one, issued by NASA and reproduced in newspapers all over the world. (-5903). As of 1969. ... Then in 2004 came the DOCTORED version - by NASA - (-684)

No.

Since a couple of days ago you didn't even know whether the lunar module had a ladder, it's understandable that you wouldn't know how Apollo photography or its cataloguing works. Thankfully you have a world-recognized expert in the subject to instruct you, should you desire to learn.

AS11-40-5903 means Apollo 11 (AS11, for Apollo-Saturn 11), roll 40, frame 5903. It identifies the one true authoritative source of that image content: a roll of film in a freezer in Houston, Texas. It also identifies the content, regardless of what format it appears in. We can say -5903 because the frame numbers are uniquely identifying. They don't restart the frame numbering for each roll or even each mission. This is why Apollo 17 has 5-digit frame numbers. You don't restart the roll numbering either for each mission. Roll 40 uniquely identifies the roll. Preflight, each magazine had a unique lettered identifier. Postflight, the film rolls from each magazine were numbered.

These are for flight photos. Photos taken on the ground (e.g., of Mission Control or the rocket on the pad) have an entirely different cataloging scheme.

When you first posted your darkened photo, you mistakenly credited it to NASA as "AS11-50-5903 HC-684." We know this because someone quoted it before you edited your post to remove the "HC-684." Then later you made a passing reference to "A11-69-HC-684." That's not an actual photo reference. Nor is there any such photo as "HC-684." You appear to be throwing around miscellaneous identifier components to make it look like you know what you're talking about.

The photo reference 69-HC-684 uses an entirely different schema. The flight photo cataloging in the ASxx-yy-zzzz format is really only for internal NASA use. While we scholars use it extensively, and it's still the main (and perfectly valid) way to find Apollo flight photos on the third-party sites, it's not the way government agencies are required to catalog still media for public release through the National Archives. That has to follow the National Archives universal cataloguing schema.

69-HC-684 is shorthand for 255-CC-69-HC-684. All NASA photographs from whatever source and containing whatever subject matter are catalogued under Record Group 255. Subgroup CC identifies color photographs from operations 1965 to 2002. HC means a color photograph entered into the NARA index by NASA Headquarters. 684 is a sequence number that resets every year.

No, 69-HC-684 isn't any kind of "reissued" or edited version of AS11-40-5903. It's just a different control number for the same photo content, conforming to the way all photographs produced by the U.S. government are indexed at the National Archives. In U.S. libraries, the same material routinely has multiple control numbers from different schemas. So if you're in a NASA building, AS11-40-5903 is a perfectly good, first-class document control number. 69-HC-684 is also perfectly valid, but happens to be the one you need to use if you're at the National Archives.

Nor was it put out in 2004, as you claim. The 69 part of the identifier is the year of issue—1969. That's why you can't refer just to -684; you need a year. Here's a link to a vintage print being sold on eBay:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/397536503563?chn=ps&mkevt=1&mkcid=28&google_free_listing_action=view_item

Note that it's identified as 69-HC-684. Note also that it's the "darkened" version that you say is lighting falloff, not the edited-to-be-more-even version you claim was issued in 2004 and given this control number. I have a number of Apollo prints from the 1960s and 1970s. Frankly they're mass-produced garbage. They have vintage value, but they're useless for photo analysis. These crappy consumer-grade prints are what Percy and Allen are waving around saying they're suspicious. And sadly, scans from these copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy versions appear to be what your author received from his various sources. His version of -5903 is provably dark compared to the original. His version of -5873 is quite obviously dye-shifted (a telltale of improperly stored dupe masters and prints).

You've already admitted you haven't the slightest idea where your Guardian author got his copy of -5903 from. You imagine it might have been from the Smithsonian, but you don't know. The Smithsonian provides images of Apollo-related objects in its collection but it doesn't provide photos taken on the Apollo missions. You imagine it might have been "from NASA," but you didn't know that ironically this is not something NASA does. -5873 is credited to the Associated Press. His version of -5875 is credited to "Nasa/Reuters." Your author is just grabbing them from "wherever." You have absolutely no basis for claiming that the Guardian's copy of -5903 is the most accurate representation of the lunar surface tones in the original film image.

Just stop bluffing. You're not fooling anyone.

 

[angrysoba]

This is quite timely, as Marcus Allen died recently.

Nothing says "timely" like "everyone involved has died of old age."

 

[Axxman300]

The "War Department" released their new website on UFOs. On page #15 there are a bunch of photos of...well...lens flares taken by the Apollo 12 crew. This is a good example of a raw image from the moon. The shadows provide depth. Also, why take extra photos at all if you're faking the whole thing?...but whatever...

 

[JayUtah]

The "War Department" released their new website on UFOs. On page #15 there are a bunch of photos of...well...lens flares taken by the Apollo 12 crew.

A lens flare generally requires the sun to be shining directly on the lens, even if the sun is not in the shot. Here the sun is behind the photographer.

Flecks like that are seen in the latter half of Roll 46 in all the dark parts, not just the sky. Because many of them display chromatic separation and a gradient of intensity across their length, this indicates an oblique passage through the emulsion layers. These are cosmic rays, a flurry of which seem to have occurred during the time when the latter half of the roll was being exposed.

Also, why take extra photos at all if you're faking the whole thing?...but whatever...

Most readers are unaware of just how many photographs were taken on the Moon. Conspiracy theorists count on this. They want to suggest that only a few photos were taken (instead of thousands), and they cherry-pick some to suggest that all or many of them were "suspicious."