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Merged Apollo "hoax" discussion / Lick observatory laser saga

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ensuring that the availability of even a near-optimum single star would be sightable by the system required access to a large computerized star map which did not exist at the time.


Just how many bytes do you think it would take to catalog the 100 brightest stars? And why would you consider so few bytes to be "large"?


Of course the Apollo ships were alleged to have flown by way of stellar-inertial guidance through cislunar space, a region also never employed as a vantage for the development of detailed computerized star charts.


"vantage"??? Bwahahahaha! Do you have any idea how little the closest star to us would change its position if viewed from the Earth and viewed from the Moon? This is right along the ignorant claims that NASA didn't include stars in the lunar surface pictures because astronomers would be able to tell the stars weren't in the proper position as viewed from the Moon.


What would any given scope see from cislunar space?


Stars! Stars that were about 30% brighter than viewed from the surface of the Earth because the Earth's atmosphere absorbs about 30% of the star light reaching the surface (minus optics losses).


No one really knew much at all, least of all anything as regards details given the equipment the Apollo ships were to carry; scanning scope and 28 power sextant.


Nonsense.


For Apollo guidance, several dozen stars were "memorized" by the computer and then supposedly found by the astronauts with help of the computer and so the inertial platform was aligned on the appropriate occasions. What baloney that is.......


This nonsense again???

How do you think ships check the errors of their gyros when out of sight of land? By sighting celestial objects and comparing the calculated bearing to the bearing obtained with an alidade or periscope. If you know your approximate position and exact time you can use the Nautical Almanac and a Sight Reduction Table to calculate the bearing to any of the listed celestial bodies (the 57 "navigational stars", Polaris, the Sun, the Moon, and Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. This is what an alidade looks like:

cfNja.png



Chapter 17 of the American Practical Navigator aka "Bowditch" aka the Navigator's Bible has the procedure. The entire book in PDF is available for download for free here: http://msi.nga.mil/NGAPortal/MSI.portal?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=msi_portal_page_62&pubCode=0002

Here is a screen cap of the first page for those who know I know what I'm talking about and don't want to read the whole chapter:

xB5Iq.jpg


Is there anything in Chapter 17 that says you cannot use celestial bodies to determine gyro error?

Such a scenario for actually sighting stars and aligning a platform in 1968(Apollo 8) was simply not viable at the time.


There is plenty of evidence that there was in NASA's Technical Reports Server including the tests conducted on the systems.


Draper was a dyed in the wool gyro enthusiast and stated in an interview, "if you have a good enough gyro, you wouldn't need a star tracker". Draper thought putting a stellar sensor in a Polaris ICBM inertial system was like applying a "band-aid" to something that did not need one.


Polaris flew for 30 minutes and Apollo for 10 days so the comparison is extremely poor.


As of the late 60s, there was no functional star sighting equipped inertial guidance system for Polaris, or for ANY ICBM American or Russian for that matter.


The Lunar Orbiters you have grossly been citing as proof that Apollo was hoaxed used star trackers.

D'oh!


So sure a stellar-intertial guidance system was built for the Apollo ships that were pretending to carry men to the moon. But certainly the deployment of these systems in the craft was not a functional deployment.


Ill-informed speculation.


There were no supra-atmospheric/cislunar star charts available detailing relationships


Bwahahahaha! Dude! The nearest star outside our Solar System is 25 trillion miles away. Twenty five trillion miles. That is a 2 and a 5 followed by 12 zeroes. 25,000,000,000,000. Miles.

That is ~100 million times farther than the Moon.

Dude! Learn a lot more about the universe you live in.



so in the parlance of the military researchers "near-optimal" stars could reliably and consistently be sighted. There is no way astronauts would be able to reliably and constantly discern one star from the next whether presented with a paucity of stars or an abundance.


Absolutely no way except the way man has done it for millenia: by using their eyes and identifying the pattern of brighter and dimmer stars. Then there is the method of telling your scope where to point and then looking through the scope.

They did not even have functional stellar guidance for earth "orbiting" missiles at the time of Apollo 8, 11, 12 and so on. NONE!!!!!!


So you are admitting the Lunar Orbiters were hoaxed too?


Of course they wouldn't shoot three guys into space in 1968 (Apollo 8) HOPING they would see the right stars with that hokey equipment with it never having been tested


It was tested on Earth and it was tested on Apollo 7!!!


HAVE TO BE ABLE TO ACCURATELY SIGHT STARS IN CISLUNAR SPACE TO ALIGHN THE PLATFORM.


Which is why that had a sextant installed.


THERE IS ZERO TOLERANCE FOR ERROR,


More layman ignorance without supporting evidence.


AND THE FACT THEY SENT THIS THING, APOLLO 8, INTO SPACE WITHOUT AN UNMANNED TEST PROVES THE ENTIRE APOLLO PROGRAM FAKE IN NO UNCERTAIN TERMS.


See above. Star trackers had already been used on numerous unmanned probes. The Apollo sextant was tested on Earth. Why would it need to be tested in space? Does zero-g and a vacuum somehow change the fact that there are 360° in a circle, 60' in a degree, and 60" in a minute of arc?

Remainder of your ignorant repetitive childish rant deleted.
 
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"vantage"??? Bwahahahaha! Do you have any idea how little the closest star to us would change its position if viewed from the Earth and viewed from the Moon?



I'm gonna take a crack at this. Haven't had a math class since 1987.

Earth to nearest star - 271,000 AU

Earth to Moon - 0.0026 AU

Moon to nearest star -= a^2 + b^2 = c^2
(271000*271000) + (0.0026*0.0026) = 73441000000 + 0.00000676 = 73441000000.00000676

Sq.root = 271000.00000000001247

So, um ... Total degree shift in the sky of Alpha Centauri as viewed from the moon instead of earth ... 5.497012056605683e-7

OR
0.00000055 degrees

picture.php



Not accounted for = movement of any of these objects; error introduced by three different calculators rounding differently; my complete failure to remember how to raise a number to a negative power; and a faith in algebraic math to solve a problem in curved space-time. But, still, that's a damn small change.

I'd have to do some research on human vision, but this might be an apparant shift that is smaller than a single optic receptor, meaning that the human eye physically could not perceive the difference.

Let the criticism begin.
 
I'm gonna take a crack at this. Haven't had a math class since 1987.

Earth to nearest star - 271,000 AU

Earth to Moon - 0.0026 AU

Moon to nearest star -= a^2 + b^2 = c^2
(271000*271000) + (0.0026*0.0026) = 73441000000 + 0.00000676 = 73441000000.00000676

Sq.root = 271000.00000000001247

So, um ... Total degree shift in the sky of Alpha Centauri as viewed from the moon instead of earth ... 5.497012056605683e-7

OR
0.00000055 degrees

[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/picture.php?albumid=681&pictureid=5312[/qimg]


Not accounted for = movement of any of these objects; error introduced by three different calculators rounding differently; my complete failure to remember how to raise a number to a negative power; and a faith in algebraic math to solve a problem in curved space-time. But, still, that's a damn small change.

I'd have to do some research on human vision, but this might be an apparant shift that is smaller than a single optic receptor, meaning that the human eye physically could not perceive the difference.

Let the criticism begin.

That is the correct answer.

It is mind-boggling that someone could so confidently, repetitively, and libelously proclaim it was hoaxed and make such a fundamental mistake.
 
I'm gonna take a crack at this. Haven't had a math class since 1987.

Earth to nearest star - 271,000 AU

Earth to Moon - 0.0026 AU

Moon to nearest star -= a^2 + b^2 = c^2
(271000*271000) + (0.0026*0.0026) = 73441000000 + 0.00000676 = 73441000000.00000676

Sq.root = 271000.00000000001247

So, um ... Total degree shift in the sky of Alpha Centauri as viewed from the moon instead of earth ... 5.497012056605683e-7

OR
0.00000055 degrees

Let the criticism begin.

This is another back-of-the-envelope calculation, so it could be wrong, but:
Orbital velocity: 107,200 km/h
distance travelled between now and this time tomorrow (approx) = 2, 500, 000 km
semi-major axis of moon's orbit: 384,399 km

How many times further we travelled through space TODAY than is the distance to the moon: 6.7.
 
This is another back-of-the-envelope calculation, so it could be wrong, but:
Orbital velocity: 107,200 km/h
distance travelled between now and this time tomorrow (approx) = 2, 500, 000 km
semi-major axis of moon's orbit: 384,399 km

How many times further we travelled through space TODAY than is the distance to the moon: 6.7.


Heh. Great point. In a little over 2 hours the Earth travels around the Sun a distance equal to the distance between the Earth and the moon. If the stars should shift their apparent positions so much they would be unrecognizable in cislunar space as Patrick is claiming then the night sky should be an unrecognizable jumble of constantly moving stars. Yet in six months the closest star shifts its apparent position by 0.77 seconds of arc.

Patrick has recently been astounding me with his lack of scientific knowledge. It should come as no surprise that he doesn't know the Earth revolves around the Sun.
 
So after pages of Patrick1000 pontificating on stellar navigation he now reveals he thinks there would be a visble change in their positions between seeing them from Earth and seeing them from the moon? So astronomy goes on the list of things he doesn't understand then?
 
Stars of Kryptonite....

Just how many bytes do you think it would take to catalog the 100 brightest stars? And why would you consider so few bytes to be "large"?





"vantage"??? Bwahahahaha! Do you have any idea how little the closest star to us would change its position if viewed from the Earth and viewed from the Moon? This is right along the ignorant claims that NASA didn't include stars in the lunar surface pictures because astronomers would be able to tell the stars weren't in the proper position as viewed from the Moon.





Stars! Stars that were about 30% brighter than viewed from the surface of the Earth because the Earth's atmosphere absorbs about 30% of the star light reaching the surface (minus optics losses).





Nonsense.





This nonsense again???

How do you think ships check the errors of their gyros when out of sight of land? By sighting celestial objects and comparing the calculated bearing to the bearing obtained with an alidade or periscope. If you know your approximate position and exact time you can use the Nautical Almanac and a Sight Reduction Table to calculate the bearing to any of the listed celestial bodies (the 57 "navigational stars", Polaris, the Sun, the Moon, and Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. This is what an alidade looks like:

[qimg]http://i.imgur.com/cfNja.png[/qimg]


Chapter 17 of the American Practical Navigator aka "Bowditch" aka the Navigator's Bible has the procedure. The entire book in PDF is available for download for free here: http://msi.nga.mil/NGAPortal/MSI.portal?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=msi_portal_page_62&pubCode=0002

Here is a screen cap of the first page for those who know I know what I'm talking about and don't want to read the whole chapter:

[qimg]http://i.imgur.com/xB5Iq.jpg[/qimg]


Is there anything in Chapter 17 that says you cannot use celestial bodies to determine gyro error?




There is plenty of evidence that there was in NASA's Technical Reports Server including the tests conducted on the systems.





Polaris flew for 30 minutes and Apollo for 10 days so the comparison is extremely poor.





The Lunar Orbiters you have grossly been citing as proof that Apollo was hoaxed used star trackers.

D'oh!





Ill-informed speculation.





Bwahahahaha! Dude! The nearest star outside our Solar System is 25 trillion miles away. Twenty five trillion miles. That is a 2 and a 5 followed by 12 zeroes. 25,000,000,000,000. Miles.

That is ~100 million times farther than the Moon.

Dude! Learn a lot more about the universe you live in.






Absolutely no way except the way man has done it for millenia: by using their eyes and identifying the pattern of brighter and dimmer stars. Then there is the method of telling your scope where to point and then looking through the scope.




So you are admitting the Lunar Orbiters were hoaxed too?





It was tested on Earth and it was tested on Apollo 7!!!





Which is why that had a sextant installed.





More layman ignorance without supporting evidence.





See above. Star trackers had already been used on numerous unmanned probes. The Apollo sextant was tested on Earth. Why would it need to be tested in space? Does zero-g and a vacuum somehow change the fact that there are 360° in a circle, 60' in a degree, and 60" in a minute of arc?

Remainder of your ignorant repetitive childish rant deleted.
You totally miss the point Matt, it has nothing to do with star position.....

Stars of Kryptonite


Of course the stars do not change position. There is absolutely positively no appreciable parallax under the circumstances. So we are in complete agreement there.

The problem has to do with being able to identify a star as unique, and do so without a modern computer map guiding one.

We are able to see 6,000 stars from the surface of the earth with the naked eye, give or take. 3,000 from each side of the equator. I was just surfing on the big Island of Hawaii. I went up to Mauna Kea for the first time to see the Keck Observatory Domes and the other great scopes 14,000 feet up on that mountain. The guide asked our tour group what were the reasons the viewing was so excellent from Mauna Kea. He said I was the first person to get it "all correct" as my answer included a reference to the equatorial location allowing for visibility of both southern and northern hemisphere stars.

Star visibility decreases with increasing order of magnitude. Let's use this simple chart as a reference for this discussion;

http://www.stargazing.net/david/constel/howmanystars.html

One notes based on this chart's data that there are 8,768 stars at magnitude 6 or lower. Magnitude 6 is the limit of unaided eye star visibility. On the clearest of all nights, without any light pollution, one is able to see most of those 8,700 stars. To see stars dimmer requires a scope to increase aperture/light collection(and in the case of terrestrial viewing, to thin out the atmospheric light, but this latter point need not concern us here).

For each increase in magnitude(decrease in visibility) there are approximately 3 times as many stars visible. So if we go from magnitude 6 to 7, 26,533 stars are available for viewing if we have the equipment to collect enough light from those dimmer objects to render them visible. Going from magnitude 7 to magnitude 8, we have 77,627 stars viewable were we to have the right/adequate scope/light collector.

Now Matt, please note from my same reference, with an aperture of two inches, one is already at magnitude 10, at least theoretically. Let's be conservative however and call it 9.

With a telescope of aperture 2 inches 217,689 are well within the theoretical capabilities of the scope. At 3 inches, a scope takes us to magnitude 11 in terms of theoretical capability. Let's call it magnitude 10 to play it safe. That gives 626,833 stars visible theoretically were we able to view all magnitude 10 objects and lower.

The stars in their constellations are known to us by the company they keep, known by virtue of the geometric context of their very constellations. Once one leaves the earth and views the "sky" through an Apollo sextant, many many many many more stars will theoretically be visible depending on conditions. If one looks down or cross sun or at the sky from the moon's unlit side, and one is fully dark adapted, depending on the sextant's aperture (which I have yet to find details as regards to), one would theoretically be able to see, 20,000....or perhaps even 200,000 or even more stars. In an Apollo craft with no computer map, a genuine astronaut would be lost in that star field. "Where is Orion??????" There would be no way to tell because there would be 4 times as many stars in its field. It would not be obvious at all which were the brightest. You actually would not be able to find Orion without some type of special training educating you as to how the additional stars would be accounted for, which ones the non Orion stars were as you WOULD NEVER HAVE SEEN SOME OF THEM BEFORE. These "new and unfamiliar stars" would need to be mapped, loaded into your computer so as they would be amenable in flight to being uniquely identified and discerned by way of the computer. As an observing astronaut, there would be absolutely no way you could do this.

Looking towards the sun, towards the brightly lit earth, or with light reflecting and interfering with visibility, or under conditions of incomplete adaptation, you might see even less than magnitude 6 stars. This is what the Apollo astronauts actually claimed was the case. But say you are looking at Rigel under such conditions because the angle is good there at "Rigel", there happens to be better viewing in that direction. In this one LOCAL FIELD you might see magnitude 8 stars because of the sextant's increased aperture. So though there is a paucity of stars overall, such might well NOT be the case in the field upon which you are sighting.

Say now you are up there and only 12 stars TOTAL are sightable and the computer sends you to what it thinks is Rigel. You only see this one star in your field. Outside of the context of a constellation, you cannot tell this is Rigel.

Recall back a ways when I pointed out that Worden was lying about seeing so many stars on the back side of the moon. He said there that no stars were uniquely discernable because so very many could be seen. I pointed out that this probably would indeed be the case, certainly if one were looking through the sextant, at least tens of thousands of stars would be visible and easily so under those conditions, even with a 2 inch aperture scope which the sextant I imagine was at least. So Worden right there was/is caught in a BIG LIE as he was describing what he knew should be the case. From our end we too know this would have to be the case, but at the same time could not have been for Worden, as were he in such circumstances, his guidance system would not work.

I'll go over this point in nauseating detail in posts to come matt as I learn more about the scanning scope and sextant specs. I even own my own sextant now and am learning to sight stars. It is fun. More importantly, this is a huge issue in Apollo Fraud studies generally and a vulnerability of the official story that is easily exploited by those of us seeking to hammer home the truth of fraud.

Armstrong denies stars for many many reasons. STARLIGHT OF KRYPTONITE FOR OUR NOT SO VERY SUPERMEN.....

Of course the stars do not move matt. But one would see an unpredictable number of them once out in the wild black yonder of cislunar space. The astronauts had no maps, no skills. The three ding dongs had but a lie to guide them. You'll never find 00 43' 53" north and 23 38' 51" armed with that.....

Sorry boys, but these dudes are busted big big big BIG TIME.....
 
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You totally miss the point Matt, it has nothing to do with star position.....

Actually you have made it about star position.

Of course the stars do not change position. There is absolutely positively no appreciable parallax under the circumstances. So we are in complete agreement there.


I hardly think so given your previous claim:

There were no supra-atmospheric/cislunar star charts available detailing relationships

Now if there is no appreciable parallax then why bring up the topic of there being no cislunar star charts? No I think that again you have been caught in a mistake and again you simply can't acknowledge it.
 
How many times further we travelled through space TODAY than is the distance to the moon: 6.7.


A variation of this occurred to me as a refutation of Bill Kaysing's stars-wouldn't-look-right argument back when I first started studying Moon-hoax claims nearly 10 years ago. At certain times of the year the Moon passes through the exact same space (relative to the Sun) that has recently been occupied by the Earth.

Another way of understanding how minute the changes in appearance of the star field would be between the Earth and the Moon (at any given time) is to consider the astronomical measurement known as the parsecWP. "Parsec" is short for "parallax of one second," and represents a distance of approximately 3.26 light-years. This means that an object one parsec away will have a maximum apparent motion of two seconds of arc (twice the parallax angle) in the six months the Earth takes to complete half of its orbit around the Sun. Objects farther away than one parsec will have smaller parallax angles, and thus less apparent motion. Proxima Centauri, the closest star outside our solar system, is approximately 4.22 light-years away. Therefore, the greatest possible apparent motion for any star from a vantage point within 1 AU of the Sun is somewhat less than two seconds of arc, or around 1/750,000 of a full circle. As noted, the distance from the Earth to the Moon is only a small fraction of an AU, so any apparent motion of the stars due to moving between the two would be much smaller still.
 
Yet in six months the closest star shifts its apparent position by 0.77 seconds of arc.


[nitpick]The parallax angle is the angle between a line passing through the Earth and Proxima Centauri, and a line passing through the Sun and Proxima Centauri, so the apparent motion is actually 2*0.77=1.54 seconds of arc; still an incredibly small amount.[/nitpick]
 
Once again, confusion of precision with accuracy.

Patrick, you have previously stated there was "zero margin for error".

Name one science or engineering task where this is true or retract the claim.
 
The astronauts had no maps, no skills.


In 1963, Buzz Aldrin completed his Doctor of Science in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT.

His PhD dissertation is available online. Its title: Line-of-sight guidance techniques for manned orbital rendezvous.

Its abstract:

Buzz Aldrin said:
A study is made of the inertial rotation of the line of sight throughout three dimensional Keplerian rendezvous trajectories. A simple, yet very meaningful method of classifying rendezvous trajectories through the use of "Rendezvous Parameters" is presented. Simple approximate expressions are derived in terms of these parameters which greatly facilitate the analysis of rendezvous guidance.

The noncoplanar aspects of rendezvous are analyzed by a method, valid for low relative inclinations, which, based on two brief target position observations, permits the simple calculation of the out-of-plane velocity change required to shift the relative line of nodes to a predetermined point.

These principles are then applied to a specific rendezvous mission situation, namely the NASA Gemini rendezvous mission. A rendezvous guidance technique, designed to extend man's control capabilities, is derived, whereby, through a sight reticle programmed to vary inertially for a selected exact nominal Keplerian trajectory, the astronaut can initiate, monitor and correct his intercept to maintain a collision course up to the braking or velocity matching maneuver.

This optical method of rendezvous is thoroughly analyzed and, through a digital computer simulation, found capable of performing successful rendezvous within prescribed velocity change limitations for significantly large uncertainties in the knowledge of initial orbit conditions and for significant errors in observations, tracking, and thrust correction application. The results of the study of the specific mission application are then demonstrated to be directly extendible both to a wide range of near-Earth manned orbital operations including targets of extreme ellipticity, and to orbital operations in the vicinity of the Moon


Aldrin's "DEDICATION" is kind of interesting:

Buzz Aldrin said:
In the hopes that this work may in some way contribute to their exploration of space, this is dedicated to the crew members of this country's present and future manned space programs. If only I could join them in their exciting endeavors!


The subsequent 300+ pages attest to Aldrin's navigational, observational, and mathematical skills. His dissertation ends with a biography that notes his graduation from West Point ranked third in his class, his F-86 combat experience in which he destroyed two MIG-15s and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, and his service as flight commander in an F-100 tactical fighter squadron.

It would be fun to watch Buzz Aldrin demonstrate his skills on the philosophunculist who denies them.

Sorry boys, but these dudes are busted big big big BIG TIME.....
:notm
 
The problem has to do with being able to identify a star as unique, and do so without a modern computer map guiding one.

Just to make sure, are you now claiming that Apollo was hoaxed because of the inability of the astronauts to identify "guide" stars, because if you are, you might want to "re-think" that claim.

Edited by Gaspode: 
Edited for moderated thread.


...but these dudes are busted big big big BIG TIME.....
Once again, just because you "declare" it fake is not evidence. Why can't you post convincing evidence if you are right??


Patrick, what evidence would convince you that you are wrong?
 
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Patrick, you were the one who suggested that the stars needed to be mapped from the vantage of cislunar space:
Of course the Apollo ships were alleged to have flown by way of stellar-inertial guidance through cislunar space, a region also never employed as a vantage for the development of detailed computerized star charts.
If you are now conceding that there would be no appreciable changes due to parallax, why on earth would you suggest that the stars would need to be mapped from that vantage point?
<snip>
The problem has to do with being able to identify a star as unique, and do so without a modern computer map guiding one.

We are able to see 6,000 stars from the surface of the earth with the naked eye, give or take. 3,000 from each side of the equator.

http://www.stargazing.net/david/constel/howmanystars.html

One notes based on this chart's data that there are 8,768 stars at magnitude 6 or lower. Magnitude 6 is the limit of unaided eye star visibility. On the clearest of all nights, without any light pollution, one is able to see most of those 8,700 stars. To see stars dimmer requires a scope to increase aperture/light collection(and in the case of terrestrial viewing, to thin out the atmospheric light, but this latter point need not concern us here).
Wiki suggests that in perfect dark sky conditions, stars up to magnitude 8 can be seen, but pray continue.
For each increase in magnitude(decrease in visibility) there are approximately 3 times as many stars visible. So if we go from magnitude 6 to 7, 26,533 stars are available for viewing if we have the equipment to collect enough light from those dimmer objects to render them visible. Going from magnitude 7 to magnitude 8, we have 77,627 stars viewable were we to have the right/adequate scope/light collector.

Now Matt, please note from my same reference, with an aperture of two inches, one is already at magnitude 10, at least theoretically. Let's be conservative however and call it 9.

With a telescope of aperture 2 inches 217,689 are well within the theoretical capabilities of the scope. At 3 inches, a scope takes us to magnitude 11 in terms of theoretical capability. Let's call it magnitude 10 to play it safe. That gives 626,833 stars visible theoretically were we able to view all magnitude 10 objects and lower.

The stars in their constellations are known to us by the company they keep, known by virtue of the geometric context of their very constellations. <snip>
I snipped much of your wall o'text, partly to save time and bandwidth, but partly because you have omitted an important factor in your argument. So important, in fact, that it debunks your entire argument.

Let us look at your last sentence again.
The stars in their constellations are known to us by the company they keep, known by virtue of the geometric context of their very constellations.
Is the position of a star relative to others the only way we can recognise it? Are you sure about that? Of course it isn't; we also recognise stars by their relative brightness to other stars. If more stars are visible, we can still find the constellations and individual stars with certainty because of their brightness.

I am sure that when you were at the observatory you mention, seeing thousands of stars, you will have noted that though you could see stars at a higher magnitude than you can when viewing the stars from (say) a city, you can still pinpoint the familiar constellations and stars.

This holds true whether you are standing on the moon or the earth; with the aid of a simple star map (or just a visual memory) and knowing roughly which direction to look, identifying individual stars presents no difficulty whatsoever.

So why do you contend that the astronauts would not be able to do this?
 
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You totally miss the point Matt, it has nothing to do with star position.....

Stars of Kryptonite


Of course the stars do not change position. There is absolutely positively no appreciable parallax under the circumstances. So we are in complete agreement there.


I would like to believe you are not backpedaling but your previous demonstrated lack of scientific knowledge prevents me giving you the benefit of the doubt.


The problem has to do with being able to identify a star as unique, and do so without a modern computer map guiding one.


You do not need to store hundreds of thousands of star coordinates in order to find 37 of the brightest stars. Finding a bright stars is not a Sherlock Holmes story: you do not need to eliminate 600,000 dimmer stars and whatever remains, no matter how bright, must be star you were looking for.

... Let's call it magnitude 10 to play it safe. That gives 626,833 stars visible theoretically were we able to view all magnitude 10 objects and lower.

...If one looks down or cross sun or at the sky from the moon's unlit side, and one is fully dark adapted, depending on the sextant's aperture (which I have yet to find details as regards to), one would theoretically be able to see, 20,000....or perhaps even 200,000 or even more stars.



You are confusing aperture with field of view. The Apollo sextant had a 1.8° FOV. The sky covers 41252.96 square degrees. The area of the sextant's FOV covers 10.18 square degrees. So about 154 magnitude 10 or brighter star would be visible in the sextant's FOV on average. All of this, and the remainder of your poorly thought out post, ignores the simple fact that brighter stars will proportionally be brighter the more stars that can be seen.

You are no doubt struggling under the misconception that stars remain as bright as they are no matter how much more light is collected.


In an Apollo craft with no computer map, a genuine astronaut would be lost in that star field. "Where is Orion??????"

Here is Orion. Gee, look. Thousands of stars and I can easily identify Betelgeuse, Rigel, Bellatrix, and the Belt stars amidst thousands of other stars.

CUW1O.png



... Say now you are up there and only 12 stars TOTAL are sightable and the computer sends you to what it thinks is Rigel. You only see this one star in your field. Outside of the context of a constellation, you cannot tell this is Rigel.


The scanning telescope had a 60° FOV. All the nearby stars that let us identify Rigel as Rigel are within the scanning telescope's FOV.
 
The problem has to do with being able to identify a star as unique, and do so without a modern computer map guiding one.

You are insane.

The constellation of Orion, or any other constellation, is not made up of a dozen random stars. It is made up of stars that are largely the brightest in that spot of the sky. Bright stars that appear to any eye (whether or not that eye is trained in the classical constellations) to form patterns.

Take Orion. Orion is bounded by Betelgeuse and Rigel. Two of the brightest stars in the sky. If you can see only a dozen stars in the twilight sky, or through a haze, you will see those two.

It doesn't matter how much you fill the space between, because these are still unique stars; regardless of whether the background is black, filled with stars, or filled with the tartan of Clan MacAlister of Glenbarr. No possible viewing condition will make other stars brighter than these stars, or make these dimmer than their surroundings.

I've viewed constellations through the smog of my home town and on a crisp Christmas morning on a lonely highway in the middle of Nevada (and while hiking on a glacier in Alaska) and, yes, I've had times where there was an embarrassment of stars in the sky. But never a time in which the constellations were not, still, the brightest objects.

This is such a frigging non-starter. So you are seeing too many stars? Take your visual system down a couple stops! Sheesh -- just hold a sheet of ND in front of your eyes, if you are having so much trouble.

The human visual system doesn't even work that way. It doesn't have a set exposure. It doesn't accept inputs in terms of absolutes. It is a constantly self-adjusting system that communicates in terms of relative intensities. And there is no common situation by the relative intensities of the stars making up a constellation and background stars will swap relative intensities.
 
Say now you are up there and only 12 stars TOTAL are sightable and the computer sends you to what it thinks is Rigel. You only see this one star in your field. Outside of the context of a constellation, you cannot tell this is Rigel.


What the heck does any of this matter?

The star you're looking for is found by degree above the horizon and direction. It's not found based on being in a constellation.

And when you look where it's supposed to be, you see it. Because there is no appreciable difference in viewing between the earth and he moon.

There could be a million visible stars in the sky, only one of them is going to be at a specific address.

Think of it this way - you can see 180 degrees of arc. That 180 degrees can be split up into 60 minutes each. So, you can see 10,800 minutes. Each minutes is composed of 60 seconds. You can see 648,000 seconds. And that's just in a straight line.

I have no idea how to do the math to describe how many seconds of arc there are in a 180 degree dome.


So, just one straight line gives you room for 648,000 stars, each with their own address. If you pointed a sextant at Rigel, you'll still only see Rigel.

And Rigel is 772.51 light years away. The one slice of sky we're dealing with, because I can't do 3D models, is pi*r long, or 2426.840165 light years from horizon to horizon.

Of our 648000 second of arc, There is 0.004 light years between each second at the distance of Rigel. That's a distance of 23,513,999,300 miles. 23 and a half billion miles.

My point: There's plenty of room in the sky for a couple tens of thousands more stars without ever getting up on top of one of your guide stars. Even if one did, you could just swith to another guide star.


ETA: Sorry for the eighth grade math.
 
What the heck does any of this matter?

The star you're looking for is found by degree above the horizon and direction. It's not found based on being in a constellation.

And when you look where it's supposed to be, you see it.

I think what Patrick is saying here is that they are trying to find out where THEY are by finding a star. You are describing how to find the STAR based on knowing where you are. If it really was the case that we couldn't tell a 1st magnitude star from a 16th magnitude star because they all look the same, he'd have a point. Maybe. But, of course, we can.
 
[nitpick]The parallax angle is the angle between a line passing through the Earth and Proxima Centauri, and a line passing through the Sun and Proxima Centauri, so the apparent motion is actually 2*0.77=1.54 seconds of arc; still an incredibly small amount.[/nitpick]


D'oh! Stupid circles.

Thanks for the correction.

I just noticed I made the opposite mistake in my sextant FOV area of coerage. It should be 2.5 square degrees and 39 stars visible.
 
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