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Apollo 11 Moon Landing Revisited: Hoax ~vs~ Debunk

Vixen said:
WD Clinger, perhaps now we are getting somewhere? Bearing in mind the topic matter, consider the following hypothetical scenario. (NB: that is not to say it is a hypothetical question.)

A country, let's say Nonsuch Republic, makes a political decision to make a global name for itself in a 'Space Race' ...
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Here is your problem: You act as if what you know about the Apollo programme is all the evidence which exists for the Apollo programme. It's embarrassing. Drop the stupid digressions into pointless hypotheticals and stick to reality. Is there any element of the real Apollo missions which you find genuine reason to doubt? (Or are you just craving attention?)
 
Vixen said:
No, just turn your back on the sun.
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You could do that, unless your assignment is to photograph whatever is in the direction of the sun.

The sun shining directly in the lens does not render the entire picture unusable, with caveats. Assuming an ideal lens, you're simply taking a picture that includes the sun. That portion of the picture will be overexposed if you set your camera to expose the rest of the subject properly. This is not a problem for photography. I routinely take pictures with overexposed regions. In modern DSLRs there is a visual indication on the screen telling you that a region was overexposed. The rest of the picture is fine.

The caveat is that lenses are never ideal. With as strong a light source as the sun, there are various undesirable effects that come from coatings on the lens, artifacts of grinding, and the simple facts of interreflection among lens elements. The latter are generally categorized as catadioptric effects. They are undesirable in artistic photography, but unavoidable in journalism or documentary photography. Apollo photography was mostly the latter, and as such included many up-sun imagines in which these effects appear and sometimes predominate. This is often because the photo in question is part of an assigned panorama where those desiring the photos understand the limitations.
 
Here's a picture I took in January on a sunny day looking across the marsh towards the Cleveland Hills.
It's one of a few I grabbed on my phone as I was walking to the shops.
The sun is in the frame and as JayUtah says, it's overexposed but you can still see the marsh and hills.

IMG_20250110_111835.jpg
 
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Vixen said:
A country, let's say Nonsuch Republic, makes a political decision...
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This whole scenario is conspiratorial twaddle. It's a cute story, but it has nothing to with what really happened on Apollo.

No, you don't get to pass off "training photos" as the real thing and get away with it for very long in the United States. Someone is always looking to make hay of such things. Your story all but assumes the allegedly problematic evidence is known by someone to be fake. And all the hoax claims that attempt to make the political argument do the same. Spinning a fanciful story around fake photos doesn't change the calculus of how you think you know they're fake. If your argument for fake photos is based on patent ignorance of how photography works, then there's nothing to try to explain by means of that story.

It's pure circular reasoning.

Vixen said:
This goes down very well and is deemed globally as highly successful. Over time all school children are taught the physics of walking on Orange, based on these videos (as imagined by Nonsuch Republic's top brains).
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No, you don't get to say that physics is somehow taught fictionally to excuse the evidence and that this won't have consequences elsewhere.

Vixen said:
You are professionally expected to be impartial and to consider the claims of the objectors.
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You are not impartial. None of the sources you're cribbing these arguments from are impartial. They're trying to make money off gullible readers and they're not even being very secretive about that. You find their first lies pretty quickly when you get into it.

Vixen said:
Here's your problem: are you able to assess the claims objectively, or will your education based on Nonsuch Republic's simulations take sovereignty?
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NASA does not expect you to accept the evidence of Apollo based on some national fervor. If that were the case they wouldn't need to provide evidence. The copious evidence arising from the Apollo program is what you hoax claimants are frantically trying to explain away by this or that hypothesis, and frankly your attempts are based on the stupidest premises. Again, when the entire properly educated population is on one side the question and a bunch of pretty-much-admitted charlatans is on the other, no detective is required.
 
Foster Zygote said:
...except for Jack Schmidt, who had a Ph.D. in geology but was still an accomplished pilot.
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This is an understatement.

The scientific community very much wanted to put a trained scientist on a crew. NASA's position was that since the Apollo spacecraft were experimental spacecraft, there was no room for passengers. Every crew member would need to fulfill a flight role. Schmidt was sent to the Air Force training academy. This was not just a run-of-the-mill flight school, but the school that trained future fighter pilots and test pilots. He graduated second in his class. Not only did he become a competent pilot, he became an expert pilot.

Further, understanding his relative inexperience in engineering, he would borrow manuals from engineers and take them home at night to read. The next day he would have a list of questions to ask the engineers. By the time he flew his mission, the Apollo engineers and other test pilots considered him to be an expert in Apollo systems and procedures.

These are the people @Vixen wants to accuse of being frauds.
 
P.J. Denyer said:
Also self taught, but I've worked professionally (nothing exciting, marketing stuff mostly), had pictures in magazines and exhibitions, and done an album cover and a few weddings mostly as favours.
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Very few people these days actually go to "photo school." Self-teaching is the rule, especially in the age of web sites, webinars, and other online tutorial sources. I was self-taught in the pre-Internet days up to my late teens, and then I apprenticed for a year with a professional photographer. The advantages there are access to high-end equipment and services that one couldn't otherwise afford and access to the market.
 
Vixen said:
Of course the stars would be there.
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As would a number of sunlit objects.

Vixen said:
Out of the three astronauts, only one spotting Venus is quite sad...
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What's "sad" about that? All this fretting is just you pasting your own motives onto someone else.

Vixen said:
...when Mercury is usually close by, too.
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"Close by" what?

As with most celestial objects viewed from Earth you can only see Mercury from Earth after the Sun has gone down—but often before the sky goes completely dark. Jupiter and Venus were especially remarkable on the horizon last night at twilight. And you have to be quick, because Mercury is never more than about 28º away from the Sun and it will also set soon after the Sun. In short, you can't look at Mercury without looking in the direction of the Sun. Since the Sun was up when all the Apollo missions occurred, an astronaut trying to see Mercury would be looking pretty much right at the Sun. I don't recommend looking directly at the Sun, but imagine how your eyes will be adapted if you did so. Do you really think you'd still be able to see Mercury?
 
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