Apollo 11 Moon Landing Revisited: Hoax ~vs~ Debunk

[JesseCuster]

But how were they at tinkering together a hybrid diesel/EV car in the garage?

With one of those welding machines that can't melt steel...

 

[JayUtah]

Light reflecting from the surface and LM

Correct. Ninja'ed at last!

You get ordinary fill from the ground, even though the albedo is quite low. This is causing the diffuse shadow above the RCU. What makes it a little different than an ordinary surface on Earth is that the regolith is actually surprisingly retroreflective. It contains spherules, tiny glass spheres that are what you get when droplets of molten material from impacts cool and then drop back down as solids. They act like the reflective stripes and coatings on safety gear, and retroreflective paint on roadways. This reflects light back preferentially in the direction it came from, regardless of angle of incidence.

He's also being lit from the side by light reflecting from the aluminized Kapton film covering the LM surface nearest him.

And the suit of the chap taking the picture.

This is the one conspiracy theorists never get. Space suits are stunningly reflective. The example I posted a few pages back used modern Beta cloth. The Apollo suits used the original uncoated Beta cloth that looks like the whitest white nylon you've ever seen.

Then, finally, you can make the shaded sides of subjects look acceptable in photographs by just increasing the exposure. You might lose detail in the directly-lit areas of the subject. But you can make the shaded areas look artificially bright.

 

[JesseCuster]

Ah, ok. I see that the sunlit highlights of Aldrin's suit, and Armstrong's suit in the reflection, are bright white compared to the mid-grays of the lunar surface, so I guess the suits are much much brighter and reflective than the surface anyway, and with Armstrong opposite Aldrin and in the sun, he's reflecting back enough light to fill-in Aldrin?

 

[zooterkin]

This is the one conspiracy theorists never get. Space suits are stunningly reflective. The example I posted a few pages back used modern Beta cloth. The Apollo suits used the original uncoated Beta cloth that looks like the whitest white nylon you've ever seen.

It's fairly obvious to me, as a photographer (without your depth of experience), since the suit is by far the brightest thing in the reflection in the helmet visor.

 

[The Common Potato]

It's because they're totally ripping off REO Speedwagon

Say it ain't so:

 

[Reformed Offlian]

Correct. Ninja'ed at last!

He's also being lit from the side by light reflecting from the aluminized Kapton film covering the LM surface nearest him.

I just noticed that Buzz's left arm and leg are slightly lighter than the rest of his front.

This is the one conspiracy theorists never get. Space suits are stunningly reflective. The example I posted a few pages back used modern Beta cloth. The Apollo suits used the original uncoated Beta cloth that looks like the whitest white nylon you've ever seen.

This really shows up in the video from the later missions, since video has less dynamic range than film. There are times the astronauts look like glare on legs.

 

[Foster Zygote]

It's fairly obvious to me, as a photographer (without your depth of experience), since the suit is by far the brightest thing in the reflection in the helmet visor.

I remember one of the astronauts (Apollo 12, maybe?) commenting about how bright his parter was when standing in direct sunlight.

 

[The Common Potato]

It's fairly obvious to me, as a photographer (without your depth of experience), since the suit is by far the brightest thing in the reflection in the helmet visor.

Some tosser nicked my Canon A1 a few years ago.

 

[Foster Zygote]

It's kind of in the Allen claims, although he treats it a little differently than other conspiracy theorists. He cherry-picks some badly composed frames and insists they are the best you could expect under the circumstances. Then he claims the better photos are suspiciously good. Other claimants ignore the badly framed shots altogether and just say the good photos are too good based on the supposed problems with aiming.


Right around 45°. For left-and-right alignment you really can't miss. You just point the camera in the vague direction of the subject. Vertical framing turned out to be harder than I thought, but only because I made it so. I was trying not to cheat by having the camera at eye level and sighting along an edge or something. I kept the camera at about chest level where it would have been on the RCU mount. In real life the astronauts used it mostly handheld with it higher up for sighting.


Not quite.

The Planar lens certainly had that problem, but I don't recall that the Biogon did. The mechanical problem was the reseau plate, the glass plate in front of the gate that imprinted the little crosshairs for photogrammetry. That's not a standard feature on 500/EL models; it was part of the NASA-requested modifications. It occupies the place where the reflex mirror uplift mechanism would be and also where the magazine darkslide would ordinarily go.

Besides, it's nearly impossible to use the standard Hasselblad reflex viewfinder in a space suit anyway. That ordinarily requires you to put the camera at waist level and look straight down. Now you can certainly look down in a space helmet, but you'll be looking at the inside of the helmet ring. The thing about a space helmet is that it doesn't move with your head. It's attached basically at the shoulders. So if you can't use it anyway, and it's in the way of equipment you'd rather have instead, and you're shaving even ounces of the LM payload, then yes, you delete the viewfinder.

I was going off memories of technical drawings I saw showing the 500-EL fitted with a Biogon, but I'm probably miss remembering.

And I've seen an uncle nail skeet with a 16 gauge Mossberg, with a choke, shooting from the hip, so the idea that someone couldn't point a wide angle lens at something with all the practice the Apollo crews had before their flights is just silly.

 

[Foster Zygote]

May as well ask this question in this thread, I'm sure Jay has the answer. What's illuminating Aldrin in this photo, given that the sun is clearly behind him?
View attachment 71257

A while back, NVIDIA showed off their latest modeling software by recreating the Apollo 11 photo of Buzz descending the ladder, and showed how much Neil's suit contributed to the lighting.


We're definitely seeing his left leg being lit by the light reflecting from his right leg, and I'll bet some of the "fall off" in certain reproductions is caused by the illumination of the ground behind him from the reflective Beta Cloth, which is being exaggerated by the variables of the parameters as presented.

 

[JesseCuster]

Thanks all for the info, very interesting. It's obvious now when pointed out, that the space suits are clearly far brighter than the surface, so it's reasonable to see how Armstrong might reflect an appreciable amount of light onto Aldrin. Clearly, the space-suits were "extremely bright when sunlit" and not the (now obvious to me) much darker lunar surface.

 

[EHocking]

Camera attached to the suit

View attachment 71245

I understand the safety issues with Stanley Travel Mugs, so NASA made them wear proper PPE when handling such dangerous equipment.

But why does his coffee mug have an antenna/satellite dish?
(a genuine question. I can’t google find the device)

 

[JesseCuster]

A quick and dirty experiment, to see if I could reverse engineer that Vixen posted from the Guardian, from a scan that Jay posted earlier.

The results of my experiment (I didn't try to match up the color balance). My version on the left, created from the scan in the middle, and the Guardian image on the right. Huh, turns out there's a lot of detail to be extracted from what looks like quite a flat image, even though it's also jsut an 8-bit per channel JPEG.



Trying to go the other way results is very ugly, nowhere near as much dynamic range and lots of compression artefacts become very visible, etc. Not a fair comparison as I expect for a photo process, resized, compressed for publication on a commercial website, to not be amenable to much processing before things got ugly. Anyway, just thought it was a fun experiment.

 

[The Common Potato]

I'm currently reading Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. I'm not quite sure how this fits into conspiracism but I'm sure it does. (As surely a a man etc... )

PS Not just America.

​

 

[The Common Potato]

Just sayin'

 

[Mojo]

I can see how an honest person would gloss over what might seem an irrelevant detail in order to get to the important claim of the spacecraft's computers being allegedly too weak to fly a rendezvous. But I can't see why you wouldn't first go see if your important claim already has a readily available answer. If I type into Gemini, "How did the Apollo lunar module rendezvous in lunar orbit with such a weak computer?" I get a reasonably accurate description.

I'm amazed that Gemini had a computer that powerful.

 

[arthwollipot]

This is the one conspiracy theorists never get. Space suits are stunningly reflective. The example I posted a few pages back used modern Beta cloth. The Apollo suits used the original uncoated Beta cloth that looks like the whitest white nylon you've ever seen.

It makes perfect sense, and it's the same reason cricket players wear white.

If you're not reflecting the light, you're absorbing it, and all of the energy being absorbed by the suit is being turned into heat. So you want to reflect as much light as possible, in as many frequencies as possible, so that you don't cook your astronauts.

 

[P.J. Denyer]

I was going off memories of technical drawings I saw showing the 500-EL fitted with a Biogon, but I'm probably miss remembering.

And I've seen an uncle nail skeet with a 16 gauge Mossberg, with a choke, shooting from the hip, so the idea that someone couldn't point a wide angle lens at something with all the practice the Apollo crews had before their flights is just silly.

When I did event photography I'd take crowd shots by setting a two second delay and lifting the camera up into the air on a monopod.

 

[Reformed Offlian]

If you're not reflecting the light, you're absorbing it, and all of the energy being absorbed by the suit is being turned into heat. So you want to reflect as much light as possible, in as many frequencies as possible, so that you don't cook your astronauts.

Mmmm....astronauts...

 

[I Am The Scum]

But how were they at tinkering together a hybrid diesel/EV car in the garage?

They could do it with one hand doffing their cap.