How Many Stars Might One See From Cislunar Space With An Apollo Sextant?
One important loose end I would like to tie up before moving on to the subject of Apollo 13 fraudulence has to do with my claim that the Apollo Guidance Computer's method for cislunar navigation was a most nonviable method of cislunar navigation. One reason being, a reason that I will focus on here with several others to be covered in later posts, is that the star pattern presented to navigating Apollo "astronauts" at any given time would be unpredictable and therefore not negotiable given the rudimentary equipment.
This post will be somewhat of a review on material previously covered, though I will elaborate here extensively on those previous points. I then will introduce some new material which will demonstrate with absolute certainty Apollo fraudulence with respect to navigational concerns. I will do this by way of demonstrating that with the Apollo sextant, Collins would reliably have been expected at times to be confronted with at least tens of thousands of unfamiliar stars in the cislunar sky. As such, he could not have sighted and navigated. He never could have aligned the IMU.
Collins states very clearly on pages 383 and 384 of the paperback version of CARRYING THE FIRE(first published 1974, my paperback publication 1983) that while traversing cislunar space, stars cannot be seen unless special measures are taken. This is because the sun is so bright, one's pupils are constricted and so given the small pupillary aperture, there is simply not enough light getting though for the star to register.
In order to set things up to actually see stars so that they may be sighted for example in the aligning of the IMU, Collins wrote that the astronauts covered the windows of the command module with metal plates. Funny how you don't see them doing this or hear about them doing this, covering up the windows with metal plates, much if at all in the course of reading the transcripts and so forth. Almost seems like an ad hoc cover maneuver on the part of Collins to mention it here, but let's give the guy the benefit of the doubt.
So Collins and his buddies cover the windows with their metal plates and then Collins writes that after a few minutes the familiar patterns of the constellations would become recognizable. This, according to Collins, is assuming one is fortunate enough to have familiar constellations wind up in that part of the sky that he was forced to use in his need to avoid pointing the scope in the bright sun's starlight erasing direction.
So Collins writes in his book that sometimes one is fortunate to see constellations and sometimes one is not. Of course this is all so much gooblydegook. Of course star visibility might be variable, but were this a real mission, one could not be so casual about this matter as Collins pretends to be here. Aligning the IMU is essential for navigation , and aligning the IMU is dependent on the accurate sighting of stars. If one cannot see the constellations and identify navigational stars with consistency, one cannot go to the moon. Collins is telling us here that he and others like him could not count on seeing the constellations with any consistency and so we may conclude that they did not go to the moon.
That said, let's give Collins the benefit of the doubt on that point. Let's say that the stars do appear to the CM navigators with some reasonable predictability. Now what?
Collins says that despite his eyes being initially light adapted due to the roaring sunlight that comes in through the CM's 5 windows, he dark adapts within a few minutes, and then at that time is able to see familiar constellations provided they happen to be located in such a place that he can sight them with his scopes without the sunlight, or other light for that matter, interfering and washing out their signals from afar.
Collins of course is wrong on two counts here. First of all, Collins claims that it is pupillary constriction that is responsible for dark/light adaptation and that within a few minutes one can go from bright sunlight adapted to well enough dark adapted as the pupil gradually relaxes and allows more light to enter larger light hungry apertures. Well, one need not be a first year medical student even to correct astronaut Collins. It is rather common knowledge that pupillary constriction and dilatation are more ore less "instantaneous" occurring within fractions of a second. So if astronaut Collins were to be in a space ship with tightly narrowed pupils, as soon as the windows were shuttered, and the lights were canned, Collins' pupils would dilate, IMMEDIATELY.
Assuming this were all real, assuming one really was in a space ship that had been flooded with bright sunlight but was now shuttered and darkened so that one could sight stars through his/her navigational optics, one would at that point be in a situation where the light sensitive chemicals in his/her retinae would need to be regenerated before constellations, and relatively faint stars could be recognized. This process of dark adaptation by way of photosensitive chemical regeneration takes up to 30, or even 40 minutes. Perhaps Collins would not be fully light adapted and so might become dark adapted in say 15 or 20 minutes, but it takes a while. AND an important point to emphasize with regard to all of this is that aviators like Collins/Armstrong/Aldrin were/are well aware of this fact.
I even purchased the physiology manual that flight surgeons used covering this material in the late 1960s. It was quite good by the way. It is emphasized in many aerospace medical texts that aviators themselves be aware of these principles, how dark/light adaptation occurs and how much time it takes to achieve. Obviously it is important as their lives can depend on how well they see at night. An aviator like Collins knew and knows quite well that it is not the essentially instantaneous pupillary constriction/dilatation that is primarily responsible in a quantitative sense for dark/light adaptation. It is a factor, but far from primary here.
So Collins is wrong there too, but for the sake of argument, let's give him the benefit of the doubt. Let's say Collins is correct. He is in a spaceship flooded with bright sunlight. He is light adapted, but now must sight stars to align an IMU and so he shutters his windows with metal plates and cans what lights he is able to can in the CM and over the course of a few minutes he is fully dark adapted. Now Collins in my hypothetical is ready to sight stars by way of selecting them from a field of stars, or in isolation as he might choose them, or as the Apollo guidance Computer may suggest stars, serve them up to him.
What one would like to know is what Michael Collins might expect to see were he to look down or cross sun in the direction of a "familiar constellation" assuming he was fortunate enough to see one as he tells in his book that one must be fortunate in a sense to have the desired constellation land in a dark patch of cislunar sky. Well, what can one say about such a situation? Off the top of the average amateur astronomer's head, a rule of thumb is that one can go from seeing several thousand stars with the naked eye to seeing 100,000 stars by way of employing simple "bird watching" binoculars. Right there it looks like Collins and his Apollo Guidance Computer will be in big trouble, but I would like to be a bit more rigorous here, having spent a fair amount of time researching the subject.
Let's say one goes from garden variety bird watchers to a halfway decent pair of 7 X 35 mm binoculars, according to this chart, which of course one won't take as Gospel, but just to give one an idea;
http://www.cloudynights.com/item.php?item_id=91
WOW!!!! Pretty intimidating, 450,000 stars. Now that is not to say that one would see that with the Apollo sextant which is monocular and 28 X 40 mm(the aperture being 1.6 inches). The binoculars ostensibly are 7 X 70 mm(total aperture) because the light hitting one's brain, at least on the surface of a it all would seem to be the light collected by both of the collecting surfaces. As it turns out however, such is not the case.
Take a look at this;
http://www.cloudynights.com/ubbthre...8586/page/7/view/collapsed/sb/9/o/all/fpart/1
It turns out that doubling the surface area by viewing though 40 mm binoculars as opposed to a 40 mm monocular/telescope, does not result in a true doubling of "signal strength" as one of the above posters put it. If it did, visibility would go up by 0.75 magnitude wise, instead the posters here at this web site suggest signal strength goes up perhaps 0.4 in magnitude or thereabouts. Again, one wants ball park figures here. As you will see, I'll make my point with very conservative claims.
One point worth keeping in mind here is that the discussion going on in the above reference has to do with terrestrial star sighting where atmosphere and magnification's effect on improved visibility play a significant role. One may simply keep this in mind, it will not affect the point that I am making.
Obviously, what I would like to do is make some determination, minimal estimate, as to how many stars Collins might be expected to have access to, be able to see in a patch of sky not affected by the light of the sun, moon or earth to any great degree. The back side of the moon, or viewing the sky when the moon was alleged to have been eclipsing the sun would have been special cases when there really was no competing light. But even according to Collins himself as above, per his book, if one was fortunate, one would be able to scan and sight in an area where there was little or no competition from strong sources of light.
Here's a Wiki article that features conservative estimates of star visibility;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_magnitude
From the above discussion and then again consulting this little chart at the end of the previously and again referenced article;
http://www.cloudynights.com/item.php?item_id=91
One can surmise that at the very least our fairly small aperture equipped 40 mm 28 power sextant would give us access to/visibility of stars of magnitude 8 if not 9. So conservatively, one can say that Collins would see at least 10 times as many stars with his 40 mm monocular as he would with the naked eye. 40,000 stars instead of 4,000. And certainly this squares well with the geometry. As I pointed out above in a previous post, a 40 mm scope has roughly 10 times the light collecting surface area as 2 fully dilated pupils.
It should be emphasized here that the above estimate is exceedingly conservative and even with that, Collins would be looking at the very least, at 10 times more stars with his 28 power 40 mm "sextant optic" than he typically would sighting the same patch of sky with his naked eye, assuming no significant interference from the sun, earth, moon in terms of their light washing out that of the stars and of course assuming good dark adaptation. Both are fair assumptions at least some of the time during an alleged trans-cislular space journey.
So the Apollo Guidance Computer and Michael Collins are certainly ill prepared to deal with such a high star count, and to emphasize again, there would be times where there would be a paucity of stars as well.
The star issue is a veritable mine field for Apollo astronauts. There is the problem just discussed rather thoroughly, the unpredictability of star counts and the immensity of the counts that a navigator might have to countenance. Additionally, if a fraudulent astronaut were to identify what stars he/she could see and where exactly the star was in relation to them and say the horizon of the moon at specific lunar coordinates, then one's position would be known with certainty. If stars are sighted precisely relative to an earth horizon , one's position may be known with great accuracy. Apollo astronauts do not like this because they are not on the moon, not in cislunar space and so indeed, starlight is kryptonite for these boys. The issue with stars and lasers has been gone into already in a great deal of detail. So it is for one reason after another that Collins and his cohort avoid this subject like the toxic electromagnetism that it is for them.
One last thing you may want to play around with is this Telescope Limiting Magnitude Calculator that I found;
http://www.cruxis.com/scope/limitingmagnitude.htm
Punch in some appropriate numbers here and you'll be surprised at how much trouble Collins has gotten himself into with those lies of his.
For the sake of my argument, I'll keep it conservative and claim Collins must deal with a minimum of 10 times as many stars under some circumstances, those circumstances "favorable" for star viewing, as he would here with terrestrial sighting. As Collins is far from qualified to pull this off, and as the Apollo Guidance Computer is not able to help him to any appreciable degree, Apollo must be viewed as fraudulent. If one cannot be certain about the identity of stars, one cannot navigate through cislunar space.
Feel free to comment on these important loose ends at any time. I'll try and respond as best I can given the new points I have made and presumably what will be challenging counters from your side. I thought it best to cover these loose ends in some detail having learned so much since the subjects were last touched on.
That said, I will move on to my favorite new subject now, Apollo 13......
