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Apollo 11 Moon Landing Revisited: Hoax ~vs~ Debunk

Vixen said:
Set up your SLR with appropriate lens on your tripod, select a slow shutter speed and wait for the night skies, accordingly. I took a pic of the moon and Jupiter in town on my smart phone, just t'other year.

9 Oct 2022 by Username Vixen, on Flickr
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Post the camera settings for that pic. The ISO is going to be in the thousands and the shutter time was probably in the order of 1/10sec, nothing like the ISO 160 film and 1/250s shutter speed of the Apollo lunar surface photos And worth noting that the moon in your photo is completely overexposed and blown-out.
 
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I bet I'm not the only person here who's now reading up on and nerding out on the moon landings and Apollo missions. Anyway, I'm watching a documentary about Apollo 13, and it includes audio of Jack Swigert, including him describing how brilliant the stars were when they became visible when they were in the moon's shadow compared with the empty black sky they'd been seeing for 3 days previously because it was continuous day time with the sun in the sky. Interesting that. Might be relevant to the discussion.

edit: He doesn't actually say whether any stars were visible during the day, but he does note how visible they became when they were in the moon's shadow and it was night.
 
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Vixen said:
Obvs no random variables that could affect the fixed variables, which would be including correcting for the Moon's gravity being one-sixth of that of earth, like-for-like vehicle, like-for-like-weight, direction, speed and velocity. A random variable could be the weather or temperature, which could possibly change our expectation of the end result. For example, you could test acceleration due to gravity in the fall of an object, e.g., particles of dust and pebbles thrown up by the wheels of a buggy, by testing on earth in a lab with say, an AC vibrator and tickertape for the accceleration due to gravity and then observe the various forces that cause such dust to linger in the air behind observed said vehicle. On Earth, this would be wind that causes the 'rooster tail' effect, rather than the detritus falling in a parabolic wave. But there is no wind on the Moon. On the Moon, the lack of wind is a fixed variable and we should never see a 'rooster tail' effect, regardless of weather, temperature or other random variables such as weight or type of dust. The fact we DO see a 'rooster-tail' effect on the Apollo buggy shots of the dust whipped up behind it, indicates it was filmed on Earth, not on the Moon.
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Yep. In other words, you pulled the phrase ceteris paribus from the book Latin Phrases For Dummies as if it would give your gibberish some sort of smarts-sounding educational value to impress other. Fair enough, we've all done it (in primary school!).

Vixen said:
Not to detract from the the achievements of Armstrong & Aldrin and the third guy who stayed inside the capsule, and of course,
it is undeniably factual it all happened. However, I have a query: when the two astronauts clambered back into the capsule, via some kind of step ladder (..?), how did the capsule manage to take off again, and in the right direction? It's pointed out that there is more computer technology in one's smart phone than in the entire banks of computers at NASA at the time.
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Does this mean your position has changed from 'it is undeniably factual it all happened' to 'the Apollo buggy shots of the dust whipped up behind it, indicates it was filmed on Earth, not on the Moon'. Because we wouldn't be wanting to be debating with a CT loon.
 
JesseCuster said:
ISO 100, f/5.6 and 1/500s
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That's a handsome photo. The Moon is up now where I am, but the sky is overcast so I can't test my guess at the settings I would use. I do have some previous photos I will share.

The typical (wrong) answer to photos of the Moon taken in daylight is that of course you used daylight settings because you were shooting during the daytime. If you were shooting at night, you'd need to change your settings even though the same amount of sunlight is falling on (and being reflected from) the lunar surface now as then. The fact that the sky goes dark because sunlight is no longer falling on the atmosphere doesn't mean the Sun-Moon-Earth reflection intensity changes.

Vixen's photo of Jupiter and one of the Galilean moons is typical of what you get when you use auto exposure in older and/or simpler cameras. It used to happen all the time in theater photography. The camera is seeing a very dark background and a comparatively brightly lit foreground. It wants to find some happy medium and ends up doing extreme violence to the foreground without materially improving the background. Newer/better cameras have auto exposure that's much more adept. It doesn't try to balance across the whole frame. Instead it selectively analyzes the likely content and exposes for what it imagines the intended subject is. And some of my cameras allow you to select which part of the image to use for auto exposure computation.

Daylight exposure

1779131471844.png
ISO 50 f/1.5 1/350 s
Moon detail a little washed out, but that's because of atmospheric scattering coming into the lens along with Moon detail. You can't effectively fix that really with exposure because the contrast contraction is inherent to the incoming image. You need to expand the contrast in post-processing if you really want the customary level of detail. Naturally no stars, as they would also be mostly lost in daylight scatter.

1779131902396.png
ISO 32 f/1.5 1/500 s
(I didn't have my long lens or my Celestron handy that night.) Same f-stop. Less sensitive ISO setting. Faster shutter speed. Therefore overall less light-gathering than in the previous photo. Yet I get discernible detail in the lunar maria, comparable to the daytime photo. No stars.

1779131654830.png
ISO 2000 f/2.8 1/15 s
Moon detail completely blown out. Lens artifacts consistent with massive overexposure. Some other moonlit items visible. Still no stars.
 
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JesseCuster said:
Anyway, I'm watching a documentary about Apollo 13, and it includes audio of Jack Swigert, including him describing how brilliant the stars were when they became visible when they were in the moon's shadow...
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On normal missions the CMP would often have the CM cabin lights off while doing photography and similar tasks. They all remarked how brilliant the stars were when the ship was in the Moon's shadow. On Apollo 13 the crew was in the LM, but to conserve power they had the LM cabin lights turned out too. So they got about a half-hour's worth of shadow-side observation.

Incidentally this is where David Percy's book Dark Moon gets its title. I wouldn't say it's the central them, because the book is all over the place, from crop circles to UFOs to Tunguska to Cydonia on Mars. It has no one theme, central or otherwise. But as for the title, Percy argues that Apollo 13 had to have been a fake emergency because at the time the Apollo 13 spaceship went behind the Moon on its slingshot back to Earth, the published Apollo 13 landing sites were in lunar darkness. How could that have been a real mission if it would have had to land in darkness?

Of course the nominal mission profile requires the ship to go into lunar orbit and do 10 revs (2 hours each, nearly a full day) in order for ground observation to have enough AOS/LOS data to calibrate the descent orbit. 20 hours after arriving in lunar orbit, the landing sites will have rotated into sunlight. The Apollo missions preferred to land in lunar morning because it reduced the heat load and because it allowed for long shadows out in front of the landing LM in order to help the pilot visually guide the landing. Apollo 13 was decidedly off-nominal. It didn't do the 10 calibration revs.

Percy could have easily found this out by reading the Apollo flight plans. Instead he does what a lot of conspiracy theorists do in several genres. He went to great lengths and consulted many experts to confirm that the Apollo landing sites were in lunar night at the time he thought the landing was going to happen. This makes it seem like he's done a whole bunch of research and consulted with a whole bunch of experts who seemingly agree with him. They do agree with him on one of his premises. But he never tests the other one—when the landing time was supposed to be. He claims to have received all kinds of data "from NASA," but he doesn't know something as basic as the nominal Apollo flight plan. And what do you suppose he did when I and others told him about this very basic error? He pivoted to his alleged "whistle-blower" claims about the photos and then refused to take any more questions from critics. Did he withdraw his erroneous book and video? Did he issue a correction or a revised edition? No, he just did his best to hope no one would find out.
 
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I recall an early evening one summer in the mountains in 1975 or so when, just as the stars were appearing, we saw Skylab zip across the sky, from one horizon to the opposite, in just a few minutes. It was bright, at least as bright as Venus, I'd say. I recall the strangeness of seeing this object moving almost as quickly as an airplane but with a steady light.
 
Vixen said:
What is lighting up the interior of the capsule, given the sun is behind it? Can't be the suit, no matter how bright.

View attachment 71290
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I'm gonna take a wild guess and say it's still the sun. Ever notice how you can be outside on a bright day and it'll be, well, bright, even where you're not exposed to direct sunlight?
 
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JayUtah said:
You need to expand the contrast in post-processing if you really want the customary level of detail. Naturally no stars, as they would also be mostly lost in daylight scatter.
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I punched it up a bit in Lightroom, including increasing the contrast. The original as it came from the camera is flatter looking.
 
JayUtah said:
The notion that you can only get a rooster tail on Earth when there is wind is a "submarine tracks" level of dumb.

The professor who served as my graduate studies committee advisor in engineering was an old Apollo engineer. He worked on the probe side of the CM docking mechanism. One of the classes he taught was automated mechanical fixturing (holding parts in place while you machine them). The first assignment was brake discs for Baja cars, and part of the assignment was to try various disc designs on actual Baja cars out in the actual desert. Don't think that being an engineer in Utah means just sitting around in buildings.

"Rooster tail" is a broad enough category of ejecta in Earth terminology. This video contains most variations.

That is in dry sand. Dry desert dust is much finer and much more amenable to aerosolization. Here are things to note:

Persistent aerosolization. The aerosol cloud sticks around for several seconds and is governed by local turbulence. You can see absolutely none of that in the Apollo film. Wind is actually the enemy of a good rooster tail because (duh) the wind blows the cloud away.

Asymmetry. Parabolas are symmetrical, but the path of a projectile in air is not a symmetrical parabola. You see the front half of a rooster tail because it hasn't been affected yet much by air. You see the back half of a rooster tail as a cloud because air has taken over. In the lunar Grand Prix footage you see a completely different kind of dispersal. You see the pattern simply lose density until it can no longer be seen as a cloud, all the while dropping straight down. This happens over a very few seconds.

Vertical banding. Heavier particles resist becoming aerosols for longer. When you are able to see them in the ejecta on Earth, they tend to form mostly vertical bands. This happens when the wheel momentarily digs in a little more aggressively and ejects many particles at once. Because heavier particles predominate under this regime, it is similar in air to the kind of aggregation and coherence we would expect to see more of in an airless environment. And beginning at about 1:12 in this video...


...there is a perfect example. That combination of (a) coherent banding and (b) ballistic-only dispersal without aerosolization can only occur in an airless environment. The pattern remains coherent until it simply becomes too dispersed to be opaque anymore. Other examples include 1:05 (although far away). The specific curl of the pattern is what you get from pure ballistics when the departure conditions are roughly similar in velocity but differ in departure angle. In air the pattern will simply not remain coherent for that long. As the particles lose ballistic velocity the aerosolization forces then prevail. The cloud stays there, but the particles are no longer following ballistic trajectories. That particular pattern depends on ballistic-only behavior for the entire life of the visible pattern.

At 2:00 you can see the ejected cloud falling back to the lunar surface in ballistic time (i.e., the time it would take particles to fall simply by gravity). It is clearly a cloud and not clumps of wet dirt that would tend to fall even in air rather than aerosolize. There is absolutely no aerosolization.

At 2:32 you get more of the vertical-band swirls. They are smaller but there are more of them.
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I've often wondered how much the electrical charge of the dust grains on the lunar surface caused/helped them to spread apart while aloft (assuming they're all, or mostly, like charged).
 
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grunion said:
I recall an early evening one summer in the mountains in 1975 or so when, just as the stars were appearing, we saw Skylab zip across the sky, from one horizon to the opposite, in just a few minutes. It was bright, at least as bright as Venus, I'd say. I recall the strangeness of seeing this object moving almost as quickly as an airplane but with a steady light.
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In thinking about it, (thinking without knowing anything about the topic, that is,) it seems that I was very lucky indeed that the sun’s angle was perfectly aligned with the reflectors on this craft exactly as it passed overhead for me to see it from earth.

1779169008886.jpeg
 
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Vixen said:
Have you 'spotted' where I mentioned it yet?



Let us know when 'the penny drops'.
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Yes, I can see your response, but your behaviour in this thread has not been consistent with someone aware that they are talking with people involved with and intimately knowledgeable about the Apollo missions, instead you've been regurgitating debunked hoaxer nonsense.


What camera settings would you use in daylight that would capture stars?

Why did you mistakenly think the camera found in Armstrong's belongings was a Hasselblad?
 
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