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Merged Apollo "hoax" discussion / Lick observatory laser saga

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No problem. I've basically stopped replying directly to his claims and gone back to what brought me into HB debunking - digging into the rich resources available about Apollo and learning more about it. (Hey, it passes the time until my astronomy class starts for the term)

P1K basically declared his disinterest in reality by dismissing the new lunar orbiter photos. There's no point in discussing with him.
 
I wonder if Patrick would briefly describe how the Julian navigation system works, and why the Apollo mission feminised it to "Juliet".

Or at least tell us how he came to misconstrue a simple grid reference to be some kind of sooper seekrit method of locating one's precise position on the moon by doing extra hard sums. And why he pretended he understood it.
 
Patrick1000 said:
I just stumbled across something insanely profound today. Check this out, from the Apollo 11 Voice Transcript;

Time: 05 03 55 23

"CC: Columbia, Houston. Roger. Loud and clear. And if you would like to take it down, we have the latest position of Tranquility Base. Over.

CMP Go ahead.

CC: Roger. It's just west - at west crater, Juliett 0.5, 7.7. Over.

CMP: Understand that it is just west of the crater.
Juliett 0.5 and 7.7. Is that correct?

CC: Columbia, Houston. That is correct.

CMP: Okay. Thank you, Ron."

I intentionally left "Juliett" as Juliett.
Click to expand...
"Juliet" is correct. You are wrong.

Patrick1000 said:
Of course the system there is Julian, as in Julius Caesar.
Click to expand...

The Julian system is a calender, not a co-ordinate system. Wrong again.

Patrick1000 said:
Now I do not know this for an absolute fact, but a pretty close to sure fact. I don't believe a single one of those twenty something fight officers would know a pair of Julian based numbers if they were hit over the head with them. They work with conventional decimal based coordinates, and they worked in the degree/minutes/seconds system, like the Tranquility Base coordinates we are all so very familiar with; 0.6875 degrees north and 23 degrees 26 minutes 00 seconds. So whoever is pumping out these Julian figures, is not a rank and file flight officer like H. David Reed. It cannot possibly be Reed or one of his talented colleagues calculating this crazy stuff, right down there in the TRENCH. Right down there in real-time. Way too much trouble. Reed and his colleagues are engaged with other tasks, technical, but still relatively blue collar.
Click to expand...
Oh sure, Reed didn't know the difference between a cartesian co-ordinate system and calendar. The only one suffering from that blunder is you.

Patrick1000 said:
I went to my Starry Night Software program and cruised over to Tranquility Base. I punched in the date and time of the simulated Eagle launch; 07/21/1969 at 17:54 UT. My software gave 1 hour and 7.8 minutes as the "now" Julian based solution for the right right ascension(RA) of planet earth at that time and date("now", I presume refers to 07/21/1969). I converted to conventional decimal form and found 0.62037
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RA and Dec are co-ordinates in the Equitorial co-ordinate system, not the julian calendar.


Patrick1000 said:
So for the simulated launch, Collins got .5 as the RA and it ultimately proved to be .65. I got a right ascension figure of .620. So I did better with my software than that initial J.5 estimate for the right ascension that appears in the Voice Transcript record. Of course the numbers at this point do not seem to be all that critical anyway. The reason that I say this is because it would seem these are the numbers, the Julian system based numbers, the very numbers "they" are using for the launch. So for now, let's acknowledge that simple fact and see where it leads.
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It leads to an embarassing blunder on your part.
You have completely muddled together the Cartesian co-ordinate system, the Equitorial system and the Julian calendar, Demonstrating a total lack of understanding.

Patrick1000 said:
<snip pointless wall of text, now that the incompetence of P1K is revealed>
Click to expand...

You really have blown it.
 
Just for fun, and a sense of thoroughness, I Googled "Julian Navigation". I got a bunch of hits based on first names and the word "navigation", along with one for an artist that seems to have coined the term for his fractal art (rather esoteric and cool-looking in it's own way, but not my style).

So "Patrick", in your desire to reverse engineer a success into a "failure", you've went a long way to try to confuse the issue by taking two unrelated systems of measurement and morphing them into some third, non-existent one, as the others have pointed out. In my own mind, you've done the eqivilant of saying "there's a fifty percent chance of rain, so only half of me will get wet". Also, you keep saying that they were using returns from the LRRR as a datum - not so, because it hadn't been found by the earth-based lasers yet.

To the rational folks on the board, could you provide a reference for me? No matter how I phrase the question, I can't find the estimated landing site coordinates that were in play on the night/morning in question. I keep hitting the post-mission report or second-hand references to it. I'm particularly interested in the geologists' assessment of the location. I'm asking so I can finish out a small matrix to respond to our friend(s) "Patrick's" assertations a couple of posts back. Thanks in advance.
 
Just in case I googled for Julian co-ordinates. I didn't find anything on the first page that would make sense in this context
 
Patrick1000 said:
I just stumbled across something insanely profound today.
Click to expand...
No doubt.

I intentionally left "Juliett" as Juliett. Of course the system there is Julian, as in Julius Caesar. Now I do not know this for an absolute fact, but a pretty close to sure fact. I don't believe a single one of those twenty something fight officers would know a pair of Julian based numbers if they were hit over the head with them. They work with conventional decimal based coordinates, and they worked in the degree/minutes/seconds system, like the Tranquility Base coordinates we are all so very familiar with; 0.6875 degrees north and 23 degrees 26 minutes 00 seconds. So whoever is pumping out these Julian figures, is not a rank and file flight officer like H. David Reed. It cannot possibly be Reed or one of his talented colleagues calculating this crazy stuff, right down there in the TRENCH. Right down there in real-time. Way too much trouble. Reed and his colleagues are engaged with other tasks, technical, but still relatively blue collar.

I went to my Starry Night Software program and cruised over to Tranquility Base. I punched in the date and time of the simulated Eagle launch; 07/21/1969 at 17:54 UT. My software gave 1 hour and 7.8 minutes as the "now" Julian based solution for the right right ascension(RA) of planet earth at that time and date("now", I presume refers to 07/21/1969). I converted to conventional decimal form and found 0.62037.

This is from the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal;

"121:08:05 Evans: And when the LM does his P22 on your transponder, well then, that'll be our last shot at the LM's position.

121:08:14 Collins: Rog. Understand. (Pause)

The LM crew will track the Command Module as it passes over the landing site for the last time prior to launch and, with the Command Module orbit well known, in principle the tracking data will help pin down the landing site. With the information available a half hour before launch - including the crew's descriptions of West Crater and Little West Crater and the returns from the laser reflectometer - at 123:55:23, Ron gives Mike a final LM location of J.5/7.7, which is only about 200 meters from the actual landing site at J.65/7.54. Mike will be too busy during that pass over the landing site to look for the descent stage."

So for the simulated launch, Collins got .5 as the RA and it ultimately proved to be .65. I got a right ascension figure of .620. So I did better with my software than that initial J.5 estimate for the right ascension that appears in the Voice Transcript record. Of course the numbers at this point do not seem to be all that critical anyway. The reason that I say this is because it would seem these are the numbers, the Julian system based numbers, the very numbers "they" are using for the launch. So for now, let's acknowledge that simple fact and see where it leads.

So the astronauts are sighting the earth! That is where the Julian figures come from. Which makes sense, because if one determines the right ascension and the declination for the earth on 07/21/1969 at 17:54 UT, the time of the simulated Eagle launch, then one would know the position of the Eagle, EXACTLY. Well exactly if you had good equipment. And in the pretend Apollo world, they did have good pretend equipment. Well it was real equipment, but they actually did not sight the earth and determine its right ascension and declination from the surface of the moon. So they have good pretend precision. Let's leave it at that.
Click to expand...

I actually laughed out loud reading this. "Julian" coordinates, good grief...
 
It's really impressive that Patrick managed to achieve such high precision when he was navigating using a calendar which was superceded before Columbus crossed the atlantic. His maths skills plainly exceed even his medical prowess.

You just know he's going to wave it away as if he'd never even said it, though. As predictable and inexorable as the phases of the moon is our Patrick.
 
Jack by the hedge said:
It's really impressive that Patrick managed to achieve such high precision when he was navigating using a calendar which was superceded before Columbus crossed the atlantic. His maths skills plainly exceed even his medical prowess.

You just know he's going to wave it away as if he'd never even said it, though. As predictable and inexorable as the phases of the moon is our Patrick.
Click to expand...

Let's not let him forget then.
 
SUSpilot said:
To the rational folks on the board, could you provide a reference for me? No matter how I phrase the question, I can't find the estimated landing site coordinates that were in play on the night/morning in question. I keep hitting the post-mission report or second-hand references to it. I'm particularly interested in the geologists' assessment of the location. I'm asking so I can finish out a small matrix to respond to our friend(s) "Patrick's" assertations a couple of posts back. Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...


Here's a story I did about the geologists' part in finding the coordinates:-
http://apollohoax.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=gotopost&board=apollo&thread=3220&post=92860

I'm "Kiwi" at ApolloHoax. Note the post following mine, where Bob B corrected an error.

When writing that, I didn't know how to interpret the map coordinates the Capcoms radioed up to the command module, such as this one...

151:33:59 McCandless: Roger. For 64 thousand dollars, we're still trying to work out the location of your landing site, Tranquility Base. We think it is located on LAM-2 chart at Juliet 0.5 and 7.8. Do you still have those charts on board? Over.

...but at least I had more of a notion that Patrick1000. Boy, I burst out laughing at him saying they must have meant "Julian." You'd think that somebody who is in his 50s and as well-read as a doctor should be, would have some idea about alpha, bravo, charlie, delta... india, juliet, kilo, etc. Again we have an example of his ignorance "proving" some wonderful new nutty idea to him.

Eventually though, I printed out copies of Mike Collins's LAM-2 map and figure 5-14 from the mission report, and it became clear. The alpha and number symbols they used are printed along the edges of LAM-2.
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a11/images11.html#flownLAM2
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a11/images11.html#a11mrf514
 
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