It should certainly be a parabola, according to the well-known principle of certanis parabolus.
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Apollo 11 Moon Landing Revisited: Hoax ~vs~ Debunk
- Thread starter Vixen
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It should certainly be a parabola, according to the well-known principle of certanis parabolus.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
It makes for great TV. But it's terrible law and unusable science.
Collins went on to a successful career in public service. Aldrin fell into depression (it ran in his family) and alcoholism to escape the pressures of public life. He got sober, bared it all in his memoir, and eventually figured out how to live with his fame while only punching the people who deserved it. Armstrong went back to teaching engineering. He would notably (but a little bit apocryphally) allow his students to talk about the Apollo 11 mission on the first day of class only, and then the subject was off-limits for the rest of the term. He would also famously go out for beers with the students after finals.
These were men who understood that celebrity came with the job, but that's not why they took the job. It was an inevitable consequence of what they wanted to do: fly cool flying machines to the Moon. They went on to other things because it was pretty clear NASA wasn't going to schedule them for any more missions, and because being an Apollo astronaut was incredibly grueling and ultimately unsustainable.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Sabulum ubique permeat is the real motto of off-roading.
I hate sabulum.
Foster Zygote
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The "psychological evaluation" tack has always been one of the most nebulous and subjective collections of arguments against Apollo. Some years ago I saw someone comment that it had to be faked because the astronauts on the moon should have been "literally ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊ their pants from fear" do to the potential dangers involved. Then shortly after someone else said it had to be fake because they weren't having enough fun, and "should have been doing back flips on the moon" with joy.
All told, I put the attempts to "profile" the behavior of the Apollo 11 crew during that press conference in the same category as people like Alex Jones trying to "profile" how someone should act in the wake of an horrific tragedy and concluding that they were "crisis actors".
All told, I put the attempts to "profile" the behavior of the Apollo 11 crew during that press conference in the same category as people like Alex Jones trying to "profile" how someone should act in the wake of an horrific tragedy and concluding that they were "crisis actors".
JesseCuster
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Also worth noting: You also use a wide open lens, and raise the ISO. A fast lens can give you 2 or 3 stops added exposure vs. An f/5.6 setting. Shooting at ISO 3200 gives you about 4 added stops vs. ISO 160 film. A shutter speed of even 1 second is 7 stops more exposure than 1/125 seconds. These are rough figures, but you’ve got about 12+ stops more exposure with that typical setup for astrophotography than with what was going on with the film and settings used on the moon.
Granted, that’s for capturing deep and detailed night sky images, but still, the point remains.
Can you explain Vixen why it is that the recommend camera settings for photographing stars in the night sky, is at the other end of the spectrum in terms of exposure compared to photographing the moon (whether its day or night on earth)? Exactly why would you expect to see stars in a photograph where the ISO is so low, the shutter speed so fast and the aperture at f/5.6 when the recommend settings for actually photographing stars tell you to do basically the exact opposite and raise the ISO as high as your camera can deal with, use multi second exposures and a tripod, and use as wide an aperture as you can?
I don’t think you have a clue about any of this whatsoever, which is why you’re avoiding discussing any of this at any level of detail, despite your claims to having experience and understanding of photography. Telling us vaguely about the cool gear you used to own is not a proxy for being able to actually demonstrate you actually understand it.
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Foster Zygote
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It's pretty funny that she thinks no one will notice that she (sort of) describes a process that is much more specialized than the sort of documentary photography that the Apollo crews performed. And "slow shutter speed" doesn't really cut it. What she's still missing is that you should set your shutter to 'bulb' so that it stays open for as long as the release is held down, so that you can expose the film for minutes, not hundredths of a second. Much longer and you'll want a motorized equatorial mount so the stars don't streak - unless you want that effect. And you should bring along a cable release so you can operate the shutter without jostling the camera. Most of them have a handy set screw that can be used to hold them open for long exposures so you don't have to just stand there like a guy holding his wife's purse while she tries on clothes.
She's stumbled upon, post hoc, the very real reason that professional photographers didn't blow the whistle on Apollo half a century ago, but we're not supposed to notice that she's debunked the claim herself.
Oh, and once more, Apollo 16 did bring a special camera and tripod to photograph various astronomical objects in the far ultraviolet spectrum. They didn't just point and click with it.
Foster Zygote
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Here, by the way, is the sticker that was atop the Hasselblad film magazines used on the lunar surface, showing a handy reference for f-stop and shutter speed for various lighting conditions.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
We still have yet to see any stars in a photo she claims to have taken, with any camera.
The no-stars argument started with Bill Kaysing, who knew approximately as much about photography as Elvis Presley knew about water ballet. According to him there should be "trillions" of stars visible from the lunar surface, and the photos should be full of them.
That got amped up with Ralph René, only it got embellished to be the opinion of a "physicist" who says the starlight would be much brighter since the Moon has no atmosphere to absorb the light. René isn't a physicist. He holds a patent for a kind of soldering torch nozzle for pipe fittings near walls. And he claims to have been a member of Mensa. But he has no credential or experience in any physics-related field. He's not wrong that the atmosphere attenuates and scatters starlight. But he's wrong in believing this would make enough difference to photography.
Then along comes Marcus Allen along with more embellishment. He claims experience in photography incidental to his job as a magazine publisher. No stars in the photographs is a problem for him too, although like his predecessors he can't speak in any exact details. He just "knows" that there should be stars.
And Jack White, the disgraced self-proclaimed photo expert from the Kennedy assassination. More embellishment, as White wants to say he's not only a competent photographer but also a celebrated photo analyst. Again, no stars is suspicious for him. Again, no actual numbers. When we trace the lineage back, it's the same argument as Kaysing made almost 20 years previously: if NASA didn't get the stars exactly right, then everyone would know. So they just left them out, and supposedly no one was supposed to be suspicious that there aren't any stars.
Near the summit of claims to expertise we have David Percy. In the ultimate embellishment, he just outright claims to be a professional photographer and therefore knows the answer as a matter of professional expertise. In an earlier part of his book, Percy goes into great detail about the infamous narrow exposure latitude of reversal film. This part is not especially false. Reversal film requires you to be more precise with the exposure than with negative film. If you set it too slow, you blow out detail in highlights. If you set it too fast, you block out detail in shadow. The term "latitude" means how many stops you can be off from the true correct setting and still get acceptable results.
Percy wants to claim you have to get it right to within half a stop, or else your photo is useless. That may be true for studio photography where you only succeed against your competition if you get it exactly right. But I showed empirically on camera that you could go at least a full stop either way and still get a usable (if not especially attractive) photo. And many of the Apollo photos are usable but not especially attractive.
At that point in the book, Percy is trying to tell you how hard it is to take usable photos without a whole studio full of equipment and instruments. He's doing the "suspiciously good photo" part of his act. I pointed out how later he then tries to argue that the photos were suspiciously full of flaws. But even later in the book he's talking to a Hasselblad engineer who said the exposure latitude for the film was 2-3 stops, not the half stop Percy claimed earlier. You'd think a conscientious author would try to reconcile those two numbers. Percy doesn't. He ignores the discrepancy between his claims and that of his consulted expert and then jumps to the conclusion that 2-3 stops of latitude would be enough to get stars in photos. There aren't any, so he says the photos had to be staged.
The standard f-stop sequence uses wonky numbers for the denominator (f/5.6, f/8, f/11) because those are the diameter ratios that correspond to halving or doubling the amount of light you collect with each stop. Moving from f/11 to f/5.6 (2 stops) quadruples the amount of light you get. But that's irrelevant to starlight. You change from f/11 (down-sun) to f/5.6 (up-sun, or for shade or shadow) because your intended foreground subject changes apparent brightness depending on your shooting direction relative to the sun. The stars don't change their light-depositing values depending on which direction you face. They're just as bright if you're facing east as when you turn and face west.
Since f/5.6 is the widest the Zeiss Biogon goes, and you can't see any stars at f/5.6 (regardless of what the foreground is) the argument falls flat on its face right there. But we can be charitable and try to test his latitude claims by centering the exposure at where the Hasselblad engineer says you can still get usable images. If your lens only opens as far as f/5.6, you have to get any additional exposure from shutter speed. If you start at f/5.6 and 1/125 second, then to get 3 stops' equivalent more light—the value Percy says is enough to begin to see stars—you need 8 times longer exposure: 1/15 second. Now at that exposure you should expect to see Venus. It's a sunlit object with a high albedo, albeit quite far away. You should expect to see Jupiter as well.
I could see Jupiter at 1/30 s, but it wasn't until 1/4 s—two more stops beyond where Percy predicted—that I got the first very faint star. And my CCD sensor has much more latitude than reversal film. I didn't see multiple stars until 5 s—nearly 6 stops beyond where Percy imagines stars would be visible. And you really need 7 stops if you're going to actually see the stars without having to squint and hunt for them. So much for what would happen with broader latitude.
Of course anyone familiar with low-light photography or astrophotography could have told us this. And there are a lot of people with that kind of expertise. No wonder that after Percy made his outrageous claim, he was descended upon at his message board by dozens of photographers who brought the receipts in explaining why he was wrong. Not only is he wildly wrong about how much it takes to get stars to show up on Ektachrome ISO 160, he's wildly wrong to accept the 2-3 stop latitude claim from his Hasselblad expert. The guy he interviewed from Hasselblad is a mechanical engineer there, with no special credential in photography per se. As a matter of fact, the 0.5-1 stop latitude is the commonly accepted value for Ektachrome ISO 160, so why did Percy accept an obviously wrong number? Obviously so he could get his own version of the "no-stars" argument in there somewhere. He has to change horses to get there, but David Percy changes horses more often than a pony express rider. It's why his book and video are so insufferable.
And then the pinnacle of expertise comes along, the gold standard. @Vixen tells us not only that professional photographers have assured her that we should be seeing stars in photographs but that she's taken the extra step of verifying this from her own expertise and experience. It's one thing to rely on people claiming to be experts. It's another thing to claim to have vetted their expertise yourself. The former allows for you to realize, upon further study or experiment, that the expert opinion was nevertheless factually wrong and should be abandoned. It may be embarrassing and sting briefly, but it's recoverable. "Huh, I guess they were wrong, then," is a perfectly reasonable fallback. But the latter not only ropes you into sticking with the "experts" no matter how wrong they might turn out to be, it opens you to voir dire about your own professed expertise. And if you're the sort of person who borrows from conspiracy theories to try to make yourself appear smarter than you really are, you may be in for quite a bit of embarrassment.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
That's a reasonably representative example. Two caveats, though. First, HBW designates the black-and-white film, not the color film. That's Kodak Panatomix-X ISO 80, a very fine-grained negative film for the time. It has a broader exposure latitude, therefore it is more apt to catch midtones and be more forgiving for guesses at exposure settings. So don't try to compare them directly to the color film.
Second, the black-and-white film was sometimes used with lens filters for special photography goals that went beyond just documenting the mission. An extra UV filter was provided, for example. the FILT. designation specifies the settings for when the filter is fitted.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Of course. The reason I used f/5.6 was because that's as far open as the Zeiss Biogon will go. My 200 mm lens continues to f/2.8. There is an argument among some for using a smaller aperture because it reduces lens aberrations of various kinds at the image edges. Of course that presumes some means of compensating for gathering less light, such as a more sensitive sensor or a longer exposure time.
Somewhat restated, the point remains that there is no overlap between the settings you need to get usable photographs of daylit scenes and those you need to even start seeing stars. If you claim you can do both with the same setting, you're simply wrong.
For completeness, I did try to photograph the Moon a couple of nights ago. ISO 160 f/5.6 1/30 s 200 mm, no enhancement.
You can see little crater detail at the terminator. But since we have such a low angle of view, Lambert's cosine law is letting us have only a tiny fraction of the light we would get at a more appropriate phase angle.
EHocking
Penultimate Amazing
And those who enjoy sexus in litore
.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
I lost mine. That's why my Jupiter pictures show camera shake. On the DSLR it's electric. On my dad's Pentax from the 1960s it's mechanical, and ironically I have that cable release.
Earth's atmosphere is almost entirely opaque to far ultraviolet. You can't do that kind of astronomy from the ground. Publishing the far-ultraviolet photography before we had the Hubble Space Telescope to produce better (but compatible) far-UV images was quite a gamble if it was a hoax.
That's the famous Schmidt camera, the same Schmidt as in the Schmidt-Cassegrain optical system that some people's telescopes (including mine) use.
Matthew Best
Penultimate Amazing
But only if you're capable of embarrassment.
Mojo
Mostly harmless
And the lighting on the Moon is pretty much constant, so it was quite possible to figure out in advance, and reasonably precisely, what settings to use. Note that the aperture settings shown on the picture of the film magazine posted by Foster Zygote are to do with orientation relative to the sun.
EHocking
Penultimate Amazing
Andy_Ross
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I was taught to always use the smallest aperture possible unless you are after a specific depth of field for conposittion.
A good general rule, though I think improvements in lens technology and digital processing mean that it's much less of an issue these days (and you can get issues with very small apertures too). "Possible" is also doing a lot of heavy lifting, since, as always, you need to balance with the shutter speed for the job and the ISO for acceptable clarity.
(That said, 95% of what I shoot is done with the lens wide open to get as much light as possible, at what would have been ridiculously high ISO values in the days of film, and still usually needs lightening in post processing, so I'm not really a practical expert on 'normal' photography.)
P.J. Denyer
Penultimate Amazing
For event and photo journalism there was a saying 'f8 and be there'.
The reason the "where are the stars" keeps coming up is because the photos were taken outside our usual environment. In the environment we evolved in we expect to see stars when the sky is dark (unless overcast), as dark means night time. Our intuitive behaviour fails us outside our usual environment so the question is for lots of people interpreted as "Why when it is nighttime can't you see the stars?"