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Apollo 11 Moon Landing Revisited: Hoax ~vs~ Debunk

Vixen said:
For the avoidance of doubt, if I wanted to say some astronauts went on a 250K mile journey I have zero motive to leave out the miles, especially given the kilometres alternative. I was not aware the word 'miles' had been left out until it was pointed out just now.
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'kay
 
Foster Zygote said:
... You can pretend you don't see things like this, or that photo of the Elephant's Foot at Chernobyl, so that you can pretend you weren't wrong. But the rest of us can not only see it, we can see you vigorously pretending you can't.
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Perhaps she thinks it's like that Jurassic Park line, about the T-Rex's eyesight being based on movement. If she keeps very still and doesn't reply to posts pointing out where she'd blatantly wrong, we won't notice she's wrong.
 
Vixen said:
Can you confirm it is not possible to photograph stars from the Moon?
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No one has claimed that. If you use the equipment properly you can photograph stars on the moon as easily as on a clear, dark night on earth. You can even do it during the lunar day, as long as you shade the front element from the sun and terrain.

You're just trying to hide from the facts - facts that you've only come to understand too late make your original claim an obvious lie.
 
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Foster Zygote said:
The sky is always literally pitch black on the moon.

Being near the equator isn't necessary for the "very best views" of stars. You just need to be somewhere away from light pollution when the weather is clear. And you think there would be light pollution in, say, the middle of the Pacific on the equator? Do you actually understand what light pollution is?

In the day time lunar sky, the stars are still there. But you can't see them with eyes adjusted to compensate for a brightly lit landscape, and you can't photograph them with a film camera adjusted for the same environment. You're stuck on this idea that black sky equals night equals starry sky.
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But if you're on the equator you're closer to the stars... That's science that is! [/s]
 
Foster Zygote said:
She dramatically long on "could it be...?" and "what if..." in place of any factual evidence. Most all conspiracy theorists eventually spiral down into examining the micro-expressions of "paid crisis actors".
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The "no stars in photos" argument is usually the first to be abandoned, simply because it's so very dumb and people have the means to disprove it to themselves. Going at it for nearly a hundred pages takes persistent stubbornness.

Straight from her typical playbook @Vixen is trying very hard to get her critics to "admit" that she got something right, even if it has nothing to with the original claim. She's obsessed with appearing to be right instead of admitting error, learning, and thereafter actually being right.

"Can you see (or photograph) stars from the Moon?" is an abstract, generalized question. The claim, on the other hand, is actually whether stars should appear in Apollo photographs taken of sunlit scenes. Yes, if you take the right steps, you can see and photograph stars during the daytime on the lunar surface. But those steps aren't taken when photographing sunlit astronauts doing sunlit things. To see with the eye, the eye must be dark-adapted.

To see with film, you need several seconds of shutter speed, plus a way to block out anything that might be sunlit. I see what she's getting at when she says you can turn away from the sun and point the camera skyward. That would effectively mean nothing sunlit is in the field of view. But you still need the shutter to be open for 15 seconds or more. And as we've belabored, when the Apollo program did allow for the kind of astronomy you can't do from Earth, that's what the astronauts did with a camera specifically designed for it.

"Admitting" that there exist some conditions under which stars can be observed and photographed from the Moon doesn't mean Allen is right to expect them in photos of the astronauts picking up rocks or planting the flag. @Vixen just wants some Pyrrhic victory.

Vixen said:
Yes, and they lean heavily forward.
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And I expect someone carrying 80 kg or more of equipment to do that. On Earth that's a 80 kgf* eccentric load on a 20 cm moment arm. But on the Moon it's only 13 kgf eccentric load on that same 20 cm moment arm. The tipping moment is less.

Again @Vixen wants people to "admit" to something she says that's trivially true and was never contested, even though it has nothing to do with the claim. It's so funny that she fixates on getting other people to make these token admissions when she herself is adamantly opposed to admitting any error great or small. If only there were someone with a psychology background here who could get to the bottom of such pathological insecurity!

Expressing it as "carrying your own body weight" in the form of a backpack is a way to put it in perspective for some readers. But it doesn't suggest the correct physics solution. Vixen has inappropriately carried over this illustrative fact to mean something it doesn't. Yes it is trivially true that two objects of equal mass (say 80 kg) will both weigh 80 kgf on Earth and both weigh 13 kgf on the Moon, preserving that trivial ratio. It's not true that this has anything to do with balance or equilibrium resulting from one of those masses being carried as an eccentric gravity load.

She's so concerned with getting people to admit she's right about the ratio that she completely overlooks the massive conceptual error she's making.

This is actually pretty common in conspiracy theories and other fringe thinking. David Percy is especially guilty of this. In the appendix to his book he tries to prove that the "hot spot" on Aldrin's boot heel as he's coming down the LM ladder has to be created by a studio light just to the right of Armstrong rather than the completely obvious answer of it being light reflected from the suit itself. Percy and his uncorroborated "physicist" friend go through three pages of allegedly high-precision pidgin photogrammetry and trigonometry to prove this. It all looks very impressive and very scientific until you see that their initial error was made in the first paragraph where they ignore the error induced by their having worked from a poor photocopy of the boot sole. Focusing attention on the minutia you get right instead of the glaring things you got wrong is the sort of distraction you come to associate with people who are deliberately lying to you.

________________
* Please don't tell my technical editor I did this.
 
Mojo said:
I think she might be avoiding degrees after the "port is at 45° and starboard at 135°" debacle.
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Which is a perfectly valid excuse for using a completely wrong kind of measurement instead.

If the astronaut is standing on the lunar surface holding a camera, it's roughly 1.5 meters above the ground. The altitude angle of the Sun is 15º (from the Apollo 11 record). But if you climb back into the lunar module, open the top hatch, and stand in it aiming your camera out at the landscape (the so-called "standing EVA"), your camera is at lunar-module height: 7 meters. And the sun elevation is still 15º.

A big round of applause for our "numbers person."
 
Vixen said:
The misconception referred to was a poster claiming I got my worldview on a topic from Google, which you responded to.
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No, I didn't. I responded to your reply to that poster, which was kind of wonderous.
Vixen said:
So I put you right:
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You totally did not.
Vixen said:
my worldview doesn't come from social media, believe it or not, my opinions are things I have given a great deal of thought to.
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Social media has nothing at all to do with what we are talking about. We are talking about the ability to research factually, which Google and Wiki are rather outstanding in providing. Your alternative facts do not stand up to daylight.
Vixen said:
Rare these days, it seems, when people assume it's trolling to have an interest in a topic because presumably that is what they do so they think everyone else does, too. Demands to 'shut it down' does indicate that some feel threatened by anyone having any curiosity about anything but especially in an area that is controversial because it means re-evaluating what you have always believed in.
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The things that you are proposing are not 'controversial'; that's the whole point. They are science issues well established at a teenager's level of knowledge and understanding.
Vixen said:
Yes, lots of people have no curiosity whatsoever whereas I am the opposite.
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Curiosity is great. Questioning everything is fantastic. That's how we get a working knowledge of things. But saying things like 'you need an atmosphere for rooster tails' is not inquisitiveness. It's just daft, with no science at all behind or supporting it.
Vixen said:
I mean, I have no curiosity about 🏉 rugby but I think it's great some people do. So, I wouldn't pop over to the Rugby thread to announce my lack of interest in it or that I think they are whacko for chasing after funny-shaped balls.
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Exactly my point. You've jumped into a thread with actual professionals and you are telling them they are all wrong because you read some crank's conspiracy theory without checking to see if said crank had the foggiest idea what he was talking about.

It really doesn't help much to advance a contrary point of view just to act like you have considered it more in depth than people who have actually studied these matters in great depth, and have the math and receipts to back it up.
 
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I must say again I'm enjoying the information and interesting moon trivia presented in this thread, but I'm also very annoyed that it's removed almost all the fun from reading Vixen's exchanges in other threads, by showing her willingness to so bold-facedly ignore clearly demonstrable facts and ideas.

Hell, the 'in order to deny that there can be enough variation in genes for natural selection to eventually make a human out of the earliest forms of life on earth, I must claim there is no new information in new books because there are no new letters' guy is more interesting to watch; he's invented whole new ways of painting yourself into a corner that I hadn't even imagined before.

Whereas in this thread, after an initial phase of linking to lying grifters' intentional misrepresentations, (which, fair, those guys' whole job is to gin up plausible looking doubts) Vixen has simply been sticking her fingers in her ears. Over things that even I have practical experience in. Like the most basic principles of how film exposure works!

The best version of her photography argument would be "I think the Apollo missions should also have brought camera rigs for photographing stars from the lunar surface; I think it's suspicious that they didn't" and not any variation on "if the existing Apollo photographs were really taken as claimed, they should have stars in the sky."
 
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