You've posted the modified version of this picture. Here's the original.
[qimg]http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj//a11/AS11-40-5903.jpg[/qimg]
110:42:14 Neil has moved to the MESA. No other Apollo photograph has been reproduced as often as this portrait of Buzz. Neil is, of course, visible in reflection on Buzz's visor. Buzz has his left arm raised and is probably reading the checklist sewn on the wrist cover of his glove, which is shown in a detail. He is moving his right foot forward, as can be seen by the mound of dirt building up in front of the toe of that boot. Note the dirt adhering to Buzz's boots and knees. Otherwise, he is remarkably clean. The "Red Apple", which he would grab and pull to open his purge valve in the event of a suit leak or a PLSS failure, is located roughly over his navel. From our perspective, the purge valve is installed in the connector to the left of the "Red Apple". Many readers will note that the scan from original film looks different from the presentation of 5903 that the world has been seeing since the image was released soon after Neil, Mike, and Buzz returned from the Moon. See a history of the image linked here.
Journal Contributor Markus Mehring has produced a rectified close-up of Neil's reflection in Buzz's visor. "I scanned the best and largest print I had available, removed the roughly 5 degree tilt that the original has in relation to the horizon, mirrored it, adjusted color in order to somewhat get rid of the golden tint of the visor, and re-projected it flat in order to kill as much spherical appearance as tolerable - hence the smear on the edges, which is impossible to avoid."
In March 2005, Journal Contributor Eric Nelson digitally removed the gold color of Buzz's visor ( 321k ) and revealed an unmistakably blue reflection of Earth. Nelson writes, " I eliminated most all of the gold visor tint, leaving a spot that wasn't white and so suggested itself as a film artifact rather than a piece of dust. On scanned slide film, dust would be black anyway, unless it might be some small translucent particle. I get the feeling the AS-11 master film scanning was done with some attention to cleanliness though, which should exclude any foreign objects of that size on the image. It is possible to verify whether any wanted or unwanted tint remains in neutrals in an image by temporarily saturating them heavily; I did that to the Spot toward 100% increase, and it turned Earth-Blue. I similarly saturated the gold-subtracted lunar surface reflections, and the open sunlit surface remained neutral while the surface in the influence of reflection from the LM turned gold: this suggests the gold subtraction was accurate and revealed a valid neutral image. This suggests the gold-subtracted spot did have a blue component...and I hope I don't take too much artistic license in exaggerating it to produce a psycho-visual link!"
Kipp Teague writes "I returned to the original June 2004 JSC scan of AS11-40-5903, cropped to Aldrin's visor, flipped and slightly rotated the image and took a stab at adjusting color to offset the gold in the visor. The linked image ( 109k ) represents the original scanning resolution. I don't see a BRIGHT blue object in the sky, but indeed, whatever is there is bluish in color, and more importantly, it is NOT single-pixel scanner noise as I can see elsewhere in the scan. Even better, when you enlarge this, you can see that the object generally matches in shape the Earth as viewed over the LM in AS11-40-5924."
In addition to investigations of the intrinsic characteristics of the Spot, it is necessary to verify that geometric factors are all correct. A check of Starry Night shows that, at 0414 UT on 21 July 1969, Earth was 59.5 degrees above the western Tranquility horizon at an azimuth of 270.6. The sun was 14.3 degrees above eastern horizon at an azimuth of about 88.1 degrees. The fact that the azimuth difference between the Earth and the Sun was close to 180 degrees, an image of Earth, if any, would be near the line of Buzz's shadow. Further, because the Earth was about 60 degrees above the western horizon, it's reflection would appear at a place on the visor where a line perpendicular to the visor surface is 30 degrees (half the Earth's elevation) above horizontal. A labeled detail from AS11-40-5875 ( 74k ) shows that this condition is met near the top of the visor.
Sharp-eyed readers will have noticed that the analysis is not yet complete. With Earth slightly north of west and the Sun lightly north of east, the reflected image of Earth should be on the opposite side of the reflected image of Buzz's shadow from the reflected LM. Nelson has produced a rectified detail ( 192k ) in which "I re-projected the visor image to flatten the horizon (effectively killing barrel distortion), rotated the horizon to level, and then horizontally skewed the image to parallel and square-to-vertical the LM descent stage sides. Finally I mirrored it to produce a normal view to the west. Some distortions remain, which suggests the visor isn't spherical, so that could explain sundry slight geometric inconsistencies in the rough analysis.". The rectified image shows the tentative Earth 'image' tantalizingly close to the line of Buzz's shadow, but on the wrong side. It is tempting to think that consideration of the actual figure of the gold visor will move the 'image' to the other side of the line of Buzz's shadow, but the necessary analysis is yet to be done.
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj//a11/images11.html#Mag40
What the above tells you, if you bother to read it, is that this photo is both internally and externally consistent with being taken on the moon.
