The fact that you keep pretending not to see questions about your earlier admission that you can't photograph stars as Allen claimed, and try to drop smoke bombs, confirms what I observed earlier - that you regret having admitted that fact.
"I'm just looking for the truth," rings so very hollow when you find it but then can't admit that it doesn't fit your desired belief. Her allegiance is to the conspiracy theory, not to the truth.
She knows the right answer to the question. Thousands of photographers the world over—from enthusiastic amateurs to the world's most celebrated astrophotographers—know the right answer to the question.
No, you shouldn't expect to see stars in photos taken on ISO 160 film with shutter speeds in the hundredths of seconds. Yes, it takes tens of seconds for stars to begin to show up on that film. And most importantly,
No, it is not reasonable according to the facts for Marcus Allen to expect to see incidental stars in Apollo 11 photos.
This isn't some gray area. This isn't a matter of some obscure bit of knowledge that only an expert would know. It's just plainly, colossally, obviously
wrong. It's worse than trying to send your ceviche back because it's cold.
The problem is that Marcus Allen made his claim under color of expertise. His claim isn't just, "You should see stars incidentally in these photos." It's that, plus, "...and I know because I'm an expert." This is worse than someone saying, "I'm an expert in Latin American cuisine, and I'm appalled that this ceviche is cold." Again, this is not something upon which reasonable people can differ or which depends on some obscure experts-only knowledge.
It's just wrong.
What should we do when someone who claims to be an expert tells us something under color of that expertise that we know for a fact is irredeemably counterfactual? Either Allen isn't the expert he claims to be, or he
is an expert but willing to lie.
Either way it's just a lie.
Obviously he got the "no stars" argument from Bill Kaysing, who isn't a competent photographer and never claimed to be. Allen's mistake was copying Kaysing's ignorance and pretending that repeating it while claiming to be an expert strengthens the argument. It doesn't; it just reveals Allen as the liar he is.
That was
@Vixen's mistake too. She insinuated she had confirmed Allen's "should see stars" claims empirically. Of course she hadn't, but she fell into the inevitable pitfall of the conspiracy theorist. Conspiracy theorists like
@Vixen use those theories to pretend to be smarter than they are. They wrongly think the conspiracy claims are at least plausible enough that they can adopt those claims and convince others they know what they're talking about. "Yeah I made award winning ceviche that impressed the judges with how piping hot it was!"
But here's the problem. Now that Marcus Allen has incontrovertibly proven that he's lying about his photographic expertise, how are we supposed to evaluate his softer claims?
"I'm a photography expert and I'm telling you these pictures used fill lighting."
"I'm a photography expert and I'm telling you these pictures are way too high quality to have been taken in the field."
How are we supposed to evaluate claims like that when we know Allen isn't the expert he claims to be? It's the claim to expertise that tries to give the statements more evidentiary weight than, "Durn it all, it just don't look right to me." He doesn't have any actual evidence for the fill lights so we're just supposed to trust his authority, which he lied about.
This is why Vixen absolutely will never admit she was wrong about Marcus Allen. If she did that, Allen's dishonesty overshadows all the rest of his claims—the ones where we have to trust that he just knows what real Moon photos should look like because of his photo "expertise."
But more to the point, now that it's absolutely beyond question that Allen is deliberately lying, the question of whether the debunkers were unfair or harsh to him has a more straightforward answer. Of course in the video we simply addressed the factual claims without name-calling or value judgments. We explained how photography works—the same facts Vixen discovered and reported here—and then we demonstrated that even at 1/60 second at f/5.6 (our light was not quite as bright as the sun) you can't see stars in the photos. And we left it there.
Marcus Allen
was a liar. There can be no question of that, and Vixen absolutely knows it whether she will admit it or not. But he got off easy in that video. We simply demonstrated the contravening facts and let the viewer draw the obvious conclusion.
