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Merged Apollo "hoax" discussion - continuation thread

JayUtah said:
I wouldn't expect DSLRs to be. I expect their sensors to be calibrated to match the response of film so that similar techniques can be used in both types of cameras. But CCD sensors used for astronomy can be made to be very sensitive, so I'm told. The problem then is noise. By the time you've accumulated enough light on the sensor to register a star, other sensor elements will have accumulated enough charge by other means.



The astronauts at the time mentioned that even consumer cameras had exposure aids that could have been used to improve their picture-taking experience. The Hasselblad 500/EL was not one of them, but presumably it was chosen for other reasons.

The mechanism you describe sounds like in-camera HDR photography. There are plenty of software packages that can produce high dynamic range photos given a series of photos taken at different settings. Some of them produce very good results. You can achieve dramatic artistic effects, or you can use it sparingly and mimic the dynamic range of the human eye, which generally exceeds that of either film or CCD.

I believe someone else mentioned the stacking technique. That gets rid of CCD noise. You take several long-exposure photos. The noisy pixels are not expected to be the same from shot to shot, so the ones that appear in all the shots are presumed to be stars.
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That someone - who mentioned stacking - would be me, an astronomer.

I’ll write more on this later.
 
JeanTate said:
That someone - who mentioned stacking - would be me, an astronomer.

I’ll write more on this later.
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And I'll be grateful for it! But perhaps that would be in another thread.

I have often taken close up pictures of the Moon with my iPhone, but I have always wondered why the Moon looks so much sharper to the naked eye than on these photos. Now I have read that the eye does not register atmospheric disturbances, but the short exposure time of a camera sees a slightly blurred image, and "professional" amateurs stack at least 40 pictures of the Moon to get a sharp picture.

So it is not just in low light situations that stacking is needed.
 
This would take us a long way from the topic of this thread, and would have little to do with any conspiracy theories, at least directly.

How about I start a thread in the SMM&T board?
 
JeanTate said:
This would take us a long way from the topic of this thread, and would have little to do with any conspiracy theories, at least directly.

How about I start a thread in the SMM&T board?
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That sounds like a good idea. But while we're on the subject of astronomy, Apollo, and "Why no stars?" we should pause to remember the great Bill Kaysing (not an astronomer) who declared that the lunar surface photos contained no stars because NASA knew they couldn't get the stars in the right places and even amateur astronomers would know instantly that the photos were fake because the stars were in the wrong places. I just have to ask why NASA can't have retained a few of these astronomers to ensure the stars were in the right places in photographs. And why just leaving the stars out altogether was someone's idea of a good solution, if astronomers would supposedly expect to see stars.
 
JayUtah said:
That sounds like a good idea. But while we're on the subject of astronomy, Apollo, and "Why no stars?" we should pause to remember the great Bill Kaysing (not an astronomer) who declared that the lunar surface photos contained no stars because NASA knew they couldn't get the stars in the right places and even amateur astronomers would know instantly that the photos were fake because the stars were in the wrong places. I just have to ask why NASA can't have retained a few of these astronomers to ensure the stars were in the right places in photographs. And why just leaving the stars out altogether was someone's idea of a good solution, if astronomers would supposedly expect to see stars.
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It certainly seems that the people making arguments about stars have very little experience with photography. At night on earth, it takes a long exposure to get stars to show up depending on aperture and sensitivity (or film speed for film photography). Since there is no atmospheric scattering on the moon, it should be possible to take photo of stars during the lunar day, but of course, an exposure that would show stars would completely overexpose sunlit ground, and a photo exposed to show detail on the sunlit ground would not show stars. This should be pretty obvious to anybody with any experience with photography beyond quick snapshots with a point-and-shoot.

Similarly for eyes. I would think that if you were looking through a clear helmet lens (If I am not mistaken, the helmet lenses used on Apollo were darkened to protect the eyes of the astronauts.), if you had your eyes shielded from sunlit ground, and allowed them time to accommodate, I would think that you would be able to see stars on the moon in the daytime. However, if your eyes are adapted to sunlit ground, you're not seeing any stars.

OTOH, I remember at least one moon hoaxer who claimed that different shadow angles (due to perspective and irregular terrain) meant that there were two light sources. My immediate reaction to this was, "no, dummy; if there were two light sources, everything would be showing two shadows" (should be obvious to anyone who hasn't spent there entire life in Mom's basement, which is lit by a single light bulb), so we are not dealing with people who know much about anything at all.
 
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CORed said:
It certainly seems that the people making arguments about stars have very little experience with photography. At night on earth, it takes a long exposure to get stars to show up depending on aperture and sensitivity (or film speed for film photography). Since there is no atmospheric scattering on the moon, it should be possible to take photo of stars during the lunar day, but of course, an exposure that would show stars would completely overexpose sunlit ground, and a photo exposed to show detail on the sunlit ground would not show stars. This should be pretty obvious to anybody with any experience with photography beyond quick snapshots with a point-and-shoot.

Similarly for eyes. I would think that if you were looking through a clear helmet lens (If I am not mistaken, the helmet lenses used on Apollo were darkened to protect the eyes of the astronauts.), if you had your eyes shielded from sunlit ground, and allowed them time to accommodate, I would think that you would be able to see stars on the moon in the daytime. However, if your eyes are adapted to sunlit ground, you're not seeing any stars.

OTOH, I remember at least one moon hoaxer who claimed that different shadow angles (due to perspective and irregular terrain) meant that there were two light sources. My immediate reaction to this was, "no, dummy; if there were two light sources, everything would be showing two shadows" (should be obvious to anyone who hasn't spent there entire life in Mom's basement, which is lit by a single light bulb), so we are not dealing with people who know much about anything at all.
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I ran onto a fella critiquing his video, and I said the same thing about shadows. He asked what my experience was with cameras, "because anyone that had knowledge of photography would know what's wrong with the images". I answered truthfully very little experience and he banned me. :jaw-dropp Some people don't really think about "what they "know""
 
bknight said:
I ran onto a fella critiquing his video, and I said the same thing about shadows. He asked what my experience was with cameras, "because anyone that had knowledge of photography would know what's wrong with the images". I answered truthfully very little experience and he banned me. :jaw-dropp Some people don't really think about "what they "know""
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Um, what has lights casting shadows got to do with knowledge of photography? Even someone who has never picked up a camera knows that sources of light cast shadows.
 
JayUtah said:
That sounds like a good idea. But while we're on the subject of astronomy, Apollo, and "Why no stars?" we should pause to remember the great Bill Kaysing (not an astronomer) who declared that the lunar surface photos contained no stars because NASA knew they couldn't get the stars in the right places and even amateur astronomers would know instantly that the photos were fake because the stars were in the wrong places. I just have to ask why NASA can't have retained a few of these astronomers to ensure the stars were in the right places in photographs. And why just leaving the stars out altogether was someone's idea of a good solution, if astronomers would supposedly expect to see stars.
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I've pointed out to a number of people advancing that theory that it would actually have been very easy to produce the stars in any faked photos, and they would have matched perfectly because they would have been images of the real stars.

NASA could have easily created a catalog of star images from mountaintop observatories. Knowing the claimed landing sites they could then have selected the correct background stars for any photograph, and easily composited them into the convenient black sky hold-out areas in the images. It would have been one of the easiest and cheapest parts of the whole hoax.
 
Foster Zygote said:
I've pointed out to a number of people advancing that theory that it would actually have been very easy to produce the stars in any faked photos, and they would have matched perfectly because they would have been images of the real stars.

NASA could have easily created a catalog of star images from mountaintop observatories. Knowing the claimed landing sites they could then have selected the correct background stars for any photograph, and easily composited them into the convenient black sky hold-out areas in the images. It would have been one of the easiest and cheapest parts of the whole hoax.
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But you're using facts! That's cheating! You can prove anything that's even remotely true with facts!

;)
 
one., the hoaxers are smart enough to do all that they did, down to having friggin rockets launch, but they aren't smart enough to out stars in the sky in moon pictures
 
Foster Zygote said:
I've pointed out to a number of people advancing that theory that it would actually have been very easy to produce the stars in any faked photos, and they would have matched perfectly because they would have been images of the real stars.

NASA could have easily created a catalog of star images from mountaintop observatories. Knowing the claimed landing sites they could then have selected the correct background stars for any photograph, and easily composited them into the convenient black sky hold-out areas in the images. It would have been one of the easiest and cheapest parts of the whole hoax.
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This was one of my earliest exposures to moon hoax "theories." When I read Bill Kaysing's claim I got the impression that he believed the star field on the moon would somehow appear different because the stars are being viewed from a different position. This of course ignores the fact that such a difference in position is vanishingly small compared with the distance to even the closest star, and that therefore the appearances of the starfield on both the earth and the moon are identical to the naked eye.
 
SpitfireIX said:
This was one of my earliest exposures to moon hoax "theories." When I read Bill Kaysing's claim I got the impression that he believed the star field on the moon would somehow appear different because the stars are being viewed from a different position. This of course ignores the fact that such a difference in position is vanishingly small compared with the distance to even the closest star, and that therefore the appearances of the starfield on both the earth and the moon are identical to the naked eye.
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I worked out once that if you reduced 1 AU to 1 foot, Proxima Centauri would be 52 miles away.

I've also run across numerous people who seem to think that with no atmosphere the stars should be "many times brighter than on earth". To which I respond by pointing out that even at sea level, earth's atmosphere is about 98% transparent to visible light, and there is essentially zero perceptible difference between star brightness on the moon and what you'd see on a clear, moonless night on, say Mauna Kea.
 
SpitfireIX said:
This was one of my earliest exposures to moon hoax "theories." When I read Bill Kaysing's claim I got the impression that he believed the star field on the moon would somehow appear different because the stars are being viewed from a different position. This of course ignores the fact that such a difference in position is vanishingly small compared with the distance to even the closest star, and that therefore the appearances of the starfield on both the earth and the moon are identical to the naked eye.
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plus the moon orbits the earth so how different is the position anyway?
 
Captain_Swoop said:
plus the moon orbits the earth so how different is the position anyway?
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Any parallax caused by the moon going around the earth in a half million mile wide orbits rather pales into insignificance compared to the earth and moon's 186 million mile wide orbits of the sun. And even that 6-monthly stellar parallax is so small that there is no chance whatever of its registering on any Apollo photography.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_parallax

"The angles involved in these calculations are very small and thus difficult to measure. The nearest star to the Sun (and also the star with the largest parallax), Proxima Centauri, has a parallax of 0.7685 ± 0.0002 arcsec.[4] This angle is approximately that subtended by an object 2 centimeters in diameter located 5.3 kilometers away."

For perspective (lol) the cameras used on the moon had a wide angle lens with a field of view of about 90° side to side. That's 324000 arcseconds across the width of a photo. And you'd be looking for at most a 0.001 arcsecond shift in position of proxima centauri from the moon's point of view compared to earth. If you could see it, which you couldn't. And if the alignment was just so, which I have no idea.
 
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Captain_Swoop said:
plus the moon orbits the earth so how different is the position anyway?
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Yeah, even before I joined the old BA forum, I emailed Jay and asked him "Doesn't the moon pass through the same position previously occupied by the earth (with respect to the sun) several times a year?" Jay responded that in fact the star field looks virtually the same from everywhere in the solar system.
 
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Here's my simplistic version of the solar system. Just treating all orbits as circular, I just wanted to give some perspective of how far away Pluto is. The sun is a speck in the middle. The smallest ring is Mercury

picture.php
 
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SpitfireIX said:
Yeah, even before I joined the old BA forum, I emailed Jay and asked him "Doesn't the moon pass through the same position previously occupied by the earth (with respect to the sun) several times a year?" Jay responded that in fact the star field looks virtually the same from everywhere in the solar system.
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Using Celestia, I headed out about 10 ly from Sol and the changes weren't that huge. Sure trained astronomers might pick up a few changes, a number of those being significant, but I doubt that many laymen could.
 
A bit of thread necromancy in “honor” of cosmored/fatfreddy/etc.: the strident Apollo hoax true believer who said he lived near Madrid. It so happens the Madrid DSN station was the one that reacquired the Artemis 1 spacecraft after it passed behind the moon, preparing to enter Distant Retrograde Orbit.

That guy was a piece of work. Anyone who disagreed with him for any reason at all was automatically a liar. He literally refused to accept that anyone else could honestly believe the Apollo missions occurred.
 
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