Of course they would be valid.....But what one sees from space THROUGH A TELESCOPE...
Patrick are you now saying that stellar charts produced on Earth would not be valid in space? That the the parallax shift in cislunar space is significant enough to render said charts useless? That is an old saw that has been debunked in this thread and elsewhere many, many times. I believe that someone here proved that the difference was less than what could be resolved by the human eye.
Stop trying to build a house of cards. We went to the moon. You don't have to like it, but we did do it.
Of course they would be valid.....But what one sees from space THROUGH A TELESCOPE is not the same as what one sees from the earth through one's own pupils.
Imagine yourself to be on top of Mauna Kea, with ME DoctorPat, on a crystal clear winter evening Suspilot. The night is insane, epically transparent it is. The air ever so delicious. You look straight up, and then about, and what do you see, 3,500, perhaps even more stars. "Seeing" as the astronomers say, is perfect for you that evening.
Now, being mythically endowed, I grab you by the seat of your pants and sling shot you. UP UP UP UP you go and exit our atmosphere. You have in your back pocket a 28 power monocular with an aperture of 1.6 inches, 40mm. The collecting surface is relatively small for a 'telescope", but still much larger than your fully adapted and wide open pupils.
The fact that the scope is of fixed 28 power is in some sense a hindrance as it won't help you see any more stars, actually it sort of makes it difficult in a way as it narrows your field of view tremendously making constellations sometimes difficult to read. But on the other hand, you are good at this sort of thing Suspilot, and you have in your other hip pocket a star chart. Matter of fact Buzz Aldrin gave it to you, autographed it no less. It is a chart that features all the naked eye visible/magnitude 6 or less stars that have burned their own image into the surface of our celestial sphere.
Using this earth based chart of stars visible with the naked eye, you want to make your own special star chart Suspilot, a chart commemorating your having spent such a great night with me chatting about Apollo as we did atop Mauna Kea. It will be a chart more or less that shows what stars one can see FROM SPACE/ABOVE THE EARTH'S ATMOSPHERE AT NIGHT, THROUGH AN APOLLO SEXTANT LIKE/APOLLO COMMAND MODULE OPTIC EQUIVALENT SCOPE.
The 28 power magnification will not give you much additional if anything really. That "argument" would actually be quite nuanced according to some. The argument goes on all of the time. I own 2 small scopes by the way, and so have motivation to read on the subject for "non Apollo debate" reasons. I typically read that for the most part, experts claim with regard to stars per se, under such circumstances, OUTSIDE of the earth's atmosphere, magnifying a field won't increase one's star count, probably won't anyway. So let's go with that, even though I have also read somebody might be able to finesse things if they knew enough, were skillful enough with a scope. They might be able to work with magnification in such a way that they could pick up an extra star here or there. But in our imaginary study here Suspilot, let's just say any additional stars we pick up will be by virtue of our increased aperture.
Now some light collected by and moving through a scope is lost. Indeed, it was claimed that light loss by the ONE POWER Apollo scanning scope was very very significant. There was said to have not been significant light loss through the Apollo 28 power sextant optic, and so for the sake of our exercise here/gedankenexperiment, let's agree that most of the additional light we collect with our 40 mm lens is available to us.
In your case Suspilot, being vigorous and youthful as you are, I measured your pupillary diameter, just before I slung you by the seat of your pants into outer space, at 9mm across, huge. With a radius of 4.5 mm, your pupil's aperture is 63.6 square mms. With a radius of 20 mm, the scope's pupil is 1256 square mms, 19.75 times as big. We are catching way more starlight with that baby.
How many stars will you be able to "see" through the giant aperture of your scope Suspilot. Well, as it is "night", and you are above the atmosphere, and your surface area for the collection of light is TEN TIMES BETTER/TEN TIMES GREATER THAN THE COLLECTION AREA FOR YOUR TWO FULLY ADAPTED PUPILS, you are gonna' see way way way more stars than the 3,500 you and I counted there atop Mauna Kea.
A well made 40 mm optic with low light loss through the mechanism could easily be expected to provide improved visibility by one or two star magnitudes Suspilot. So we have 6,000 stars of magnitude 6 or below visible with the naked eye, and now, with your sextant, being able to visualize magnitude 7 stars will take you to 18,000 in count roughly, and at magnitude 8 the visible star count goes to 51,000. Let's split the difference and use the halfway point between the two, magnitudes 7 and 8. This would be conservative for a super well made 40 mm piece of military hardware. Let's say we can see 34,000 stars with certainty using our high grade military telescope. Of course one would be able to see even more stars were we to "try this for real". But I want to go way "low ball" on this to prove my point.
Stars are not distributed uniformly over the inside of the celestial sphere facing us. But for the sake of agrgument here, let's say they are more or less. So for any patch of sky we now look at through our sextant, there will be not one, but 5 or six stars, not three , but 15 or 18, not 10, but 50 or 60.
Now Suspilot, even with your Buzz Aldrin autographed star chart featuring all of the 6 magnitude or less/naked eye visible stars you still will not be able to tell with any certainty often times, perhaps even the majority of the time, which star is which looking through your scope. You look in the general direction of Orion and see 35 or 40 stars for the 7 that define the group as conventionally represented.
Betelgeuse
Rigel
Bellatrix
Mintaka
Alnilam
Alnitak
Saiph
Not to mention the dozens of "new" stars you'd see in the field separating these classic seven.
And this is only the tip of the spaceberg Suspilot. Seeing conditions would change, becoming less and more favorable at times depending on where the sun was, how much earth shine there was, moon shine to deal with. Of course there is no atmosphere to catch the light, but directing your scope right at a full moon would affect what stars you could see. Your own pupil would narrow, and so forth.
The SR-71 Blackbird spy plane, missiles, other American pieces of military equipment employ the highest grade optics to sight, navigate and guide by way of the stars. These systems require computers to read their star charts as a human cannot. Though in the case of the SR-71 Blackbird, and presumably other cases as well, if the computer mechanism cannot "find" a star, is not sure about a star, and so cannot locate the craft, locate itself, a pilot can try to help the computer. There is that option available for such SR-71 most anticipated difficulties/problems/contingencies. And of course a SR-71 pilot can fly the plane on his/her own independent of the planes automated stellar-inertial system.
Spaceships a are a different kettle of fish. In the first place, Apollo ships, don't carry fish. They carry phony astronauts, and the astronauts must be phony. One knows this to be true as were it the case that we actually sent guys up in space, cislunar space with a star chart containing only several dozen stars, which is NASA's claim, Armstrong's claim, Collins' claim, what would happen in the very likely occurrence from time to time of there being uncertainty with regard to the identity of navigational stars? DISASTER GUARANTEED, one cannot manually fly the thing from cislunar space blind, and the ground cannot help with star sightings. This is why the astronauts from Mercury to Apollo deny stars. Its a hot hot hot hot space potato.
Say Armstrong and Aldrin land. No one has been down there, star visibility we know was not good in the phony Apollo script, but what about real world. Say you were down there with the MIT bad boy Suspilot, and say you have got your AOT and that phony star chart, the one that they just sold at the auction, and you look for Sirius, Rigel, whatever. The AOT has a bigger pupil than you do so you are going to see more stars, NO? Well maybe, you don't know how much light would be bouncing off this or that into the apparatus from where, affecting star visibility this way and that way, light from the earth at high magnitude say. Can't point the thing in that direction, toward the earth, way too bright, you would see fewer stars, maybe none. So visibility is variable, UNKOWABLE!!!!!! and ditto, even more complicated for a phony scenario like with Collins piloting a CM through cislunar space and back and 'round and 'round the moon.
Actually, if one pauses to think about it, it is ludicrous beyond belief, the bogus story line, the Apollo Program navigational/guidance swill proffered.
THEY HAD NO CLUE AS TO HOW TO ACTUALLY DO THIS SUSPILOT AND SO THEY DUMB THE SYSTEM DOWN, MAKE THE SYSTEM LOOK INSANELY SIMPLE. WERE THEY TO ACTUALLY PRESENT A PHONY SYSTEM IN THE APOLLO NARRATIVE THAT WAS CREDIBLE, THAT WOULD SORT OF WORK GEDANKENEXPERIMENT WISE, SOMEONE LIKE ME WOULD SAY, "YEAH THAT WORKS BUT YOU HAVEN'T THE TECHNOLOGY YET, THE PRACTICAL ENGINEERING SKILLS YET, THE MACHINERY YET, THE DATA YET, TO MAKE THE HARDWARE OR SOFTWARE, TO ACTUALLY BUILD SUCH A SYSTEM", IT IS IMAGINARY!!!!!!!! AND SO IS THE WHOLE NOTION OF BEING ABLE TO NAVIGATE TROUGH CISLUNAR SPACE WITH A MANNED APOLLO SHIP.
You can get to the moon. Don't get me wrong Suspilot. But with a Surveyor VII, not with a manned craft pretending to navigate by virtue of employing stellar inertial type guidance with or without help from the MSFN. Remember, they supposedly can do everything from MSFN except align the IMU. But they HAVE TO BE ABLE TO ACCURATELY ALIGN THE IMU TO GO TO THE MOON.
SINCE THEY CANNOT RELIABLY ALIGN THE IMU IN ALL REASONABLY ANTICIPATED CIRCUMSTANCES, CIRCUMSTANCE THAT WOULD BE WELL ANTICIPATED AS CONTINGENCIES IN THE CONTEXT OF REAL MANNED LUNAR MISSION, THEY NEVER WENT!!!!!! Simple as that........
This piece of evidence, the ABSENCE of the relevant star charts and computer system to read such a chart in the context of Apollo as that program is conventionally presented, is proof positive of the program's insane fraudulence Suspilot. Any reasonable person could not read this any other way.
