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Merged Apollo "hoax" discussion - continuation thread

It's all a test of our faith...

(it's a sad indictment of the quality of conspiracy posters these days that we are reduced to this)
 
threadworm said:
Seems to be a re-hash/regurgitation of this piece in conspiracy kooks-r-us site Nexus:

https://www.nexusmagazine.com/articles/doc_view/343-leaving-apollo-s-legacy-behind

Said article makes the hilarious claim that



Firstly, the low resolution claim is a lie. There are many high resolution pictures of the landings sites. Secondly, the suggestion that NASA published these images 'reluctantly' is a lie. I would argue that there was hardly a public clamour for such images prior to NASA publishing them at all. Thirdly, the claim that there no photographs taken by independent observers is also a lie.

If they don't know that those claims alone aren't true, they aren't fit to be writing about the subject.

The aulis article is a little self referential to say the least, and is chock full of knowing winks and sly inferences but very short on actual facts and the kind of independent sources 'Kouts' seems so keen on.
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IIRC, most of the appollo mission photos were shot with Hasselblad cameras. These would have been 6cm x 6cm film images. They were most assuredly not "low resolution" images.
 
CORed said:
IIRC, most of the appollo mission photos were shot with Hasselblad cameras. These would have been 6cm x 6cm film images. They were most assuredly not "low resolution" images.
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Not at all. I've shot with those cameras on that film and then had the results scanned at film resolution. This was to test the theory that the reseau fiducials would have been obliterated under some conditions. And yes, the photographic results are glorious. The Ektachrome E-3 emulsion on ESTAR base at roughly 60 mm square, through a Carl Zeiss lens, is considerably high resolution.
 
Jack by the hedge said:
Just as an aside, would I be right to imagine the test results supported the theory?
Click to expand...

Yes, but not in the way some had proposed. We had proposed such things as halation to explain missing fiducials in some images. That was not confirmed by experiment. Some had proposed gamut and dynamic range issues in the scanner. This too was disconfirmed by experiment. It turns out that a combination of reduced image size and JPEG compression finally made the fiducials disappear in light areas of the image. Therefore we did confirm that a plausible workflow designed to result in web-sharable images could produce a loss of density in the fiducials.
 
JayUtah said:
Yes, but not in the way some had proposed. We had proposed such things as halation to explain missing fiducials in some images. That was not confirmed by experiment. Some had proposed gamut and dynamic range issues in the scanner. This too was disconfirmed by experiment. It turns out that a combination of reduced image size and JPEG compression finally made the fiducials disappear in light areas of the image. Therefore we did confirm that a plausible workflow designed to result in web-sharable images could produce a loss of density in the fiducials.
Click to expand...

So the fiducials density would be "washed" out in brighter objects in the Apollo image library. ;)
 
The observation was that in some photographs the fiducials would seem to disappear in bright areas of the image. The hoax theory was that this occurred when foreground objects were photographically composited over background plates that already had the fiducials on them. The bright parts of the foreground object seemed to obliterate the fiducial selectively, with adjacent dark areas (most often part of the background) retaining the fiducial.

Among the photographic explanations for this behavior were such things as bleed and halation. Bleed occurs when energy migrates sideways from highly exposed portions of the film to adjacent parts of the emulsion. Even if the image is optically in perfect focus, this tends to make small details disappear. Halation occurs when light reflects internally from the rear of the emulsion layers, from the base, or both. If the incident angle is acute, such as with the aperture wide open or near the edges of the frame, the light reflects back to one side or the other of the incident point. The layer is then effectively exposed from behind in a way that blurs detail.

What we discovered in testing was that the film was robustly resistant to both bleed and halation. This is because Kodak knows what they're doing. Although the fiducials are very fine, we were not able to make any of them disappear entirely via simple photographic exposure changes and ordinary processing. While some dimming occurred, we could not replicate the effect in the subject images by manipulating the variables of mere photochemical photography.

Since the subject images were digital, we then turned to likely digital image processing techniques to see if they had an effect. They did. Reducing the image size decreases the number of pixels that can span the thickness of a fiducial. This made them more likely to disappear in various color quantization and compression schemes. As expected, lossy JPEG compression could eliminate a fiducial entirely in a bright area. This is mathematically sound too. Depending on quality settings, the sharp transition from very light to very dark to light again simply didn't make the compression cut. It was too high frequency a change to be expressible in a discrete cosine transform with given parameters. This was not a problem when the transition was between various grays and the black fiducial.

The one photographic effect we did not test was contact printing such as would have been employed to produce duplication masters. Naturally prints and scans made for the general public were not taken from the original camera transparencies but from dupe masters gingerly prepared from the camera originals. I have seen very high quality scans of the camera originals, which are still being systematically prepared for all the missions. Naturally Roll 39 from Apollo 11 had priority. The difference between scans of the camera originals and the typical convenience downloads was stark. There was much greater tonal range in the originals. The reason we are concerned here is that contact printing can suffer fine distortion at the edges where the light strikes the transparency at an angle and transfers it at that same angle to the underlying receiving transparency. Since each color element has its own layer, you often get small amounts of chromatic aberration in contact dupes if the light source is not properly collimated. For a fine detail like a fiducial, that aberration might be enough to make it insufficiently distinct in subsequent reproductions.

The real silly part of the hoax theory, of course, is that the proposed compositing method is too stupid for any actual process photographer to have actually contemplated. The last step in this process is to rephotograph the composited scene using a process camera. The obvious way to apply the fiducials would have been to put a reseau plate in the process camera, not the camera allegedly used to take the background plates. The "anomaly" that arises in the hoax theory requires the conspirators to have been quite stupid. So stupid, in fact, that many theorists change horses and say this was a deliberate attempt at whistle-blowing. And yet somehow none of them got caught doing it at the time.
 
JayUtah said:
The "anomaly" that arises in the hoax theory requires the conspirators to have been quite stupid. So stupid, in fact, that many theorists change horses and say this was a deliberate attempt at whistle-blowing. And yet somehow none of them got caught doing it at the time.
Click to expand...
No, not whistle blowing. A deliberate attempt to make it appear to be whistle-blowing, which would then be dismissed as too obvious - thus boosting the 'authenticity' of the fake photos.

But in fact they are all fakes. Yes, every 'fake moon landing' photo is actually faked. We know this because the Moon landings are real, so NASA had no reason to make fakes. The Apollo Hoax is a hoax.
 
JayUtah said:
The observation was that in some photographs the fiducials would seem to disappear in bright areas of the image. The hoax theory was that this occurred when foreground objects were photographically composited over background plates that already had the fiducials on them. The bright parts of the foreground object seemed to obliterate the fiducial selectively, with adjacent dark areas (most often part of the background) retaining the fiducial.

Among the photographic explanations for this behavior were such things as bleed and halation. Bleed occurs when energy migrates sideways from highly exposed portions of the film to adjacent parts of the emulsion. Even if the image is optically in perfect focus, this tends to make small details disappear. Halation occurs when light reflects internally from the rear of the emulsion layers, from the base, or both. If the incident angle is acute, such as with the aperture wide open or near the edges of the frame, the light reflects back to one side or the other of the incident point. The layer is then effectively exposed from behind in a way that blurs detail.

What we discovered in testing was that the film was robustly resistant to both bleed and halation. This is because Kodak knows what they're doing. Although the fiducials are very fine, we were not able to make any of them disappear entirely via simple photographic exposure changes and ordinary processing. While some dimming occurred, we could not replicate the effect in the subject images by manipulating the variables of mere photochemical photography.

Since the subject images were digital, we then turned to likely digital image processing techniques to see if they had an effect. They did. Reducing the image size decreases the number of pixels that can span the thickness of a fiducial. This made them more likely to disappear in various color quantization and compression schemes. As expected, lossy JPEG compression could eliminate a fiducial entirely in a bright area. This is mathematically sound too. Depending on quality settings, the sharp transition from very light to very dark to light again simply didn't make the compression cut. It was too high frequency a change to be expressible in a discrete cosine transform with given parameters. This was not a problem when the transition was between various grays and the black fiducial.

The one photographic effect we did not test was contact printing such as would have been employed to produce duplication masters. Naturally prints and scans made for the general public were not taken from the original camera transparencies but from dupe masters gingerly prepared from the camera originals. I have seen very high quality scans of the camera originals, which are still being systematically prepared for all the missions. Naturally Roll 39 from Apollo 11 had priority. The difference between scans of the camera originals and the typical convenience downloads was stark. There was much greater tonal range in the originals. The reason we are concerned here is that contact printing can suffer fine distortion at the edges where the light strikes the transparency at an angle and transfers it at that same angle to the underlying receiving transparency. Since each color element has its own layer, you often get small amounts of chromatic aberration in contact dupes if the light source is not properly collimated. For a fine detail like a fiducial, that aberration might be enough to make it insufficiently distinct in subsequent reproductions.

The real silly part of the hoax theory, of course, is that the proposed compositing method is too stupid for any actual process photographer to have actually contemplated. The last step in this process is to rephotograph the composited scene using a process camera. The obvious way to apply the fiducials would have been to put a reseau plate in the process camera, not the camera allegedly used to take the background plates. The "anomaly" that arises in the hoax theory requires the conspirators to have been quite stupid. So stupid, in fact, that many theorists change horses and say this was a deliberate attempt at whistle-blowing. And yet somehow none of them got caught doing it at the time.
Click to expand...

And thusly the "C" rock came to be, by a slight fiber becoming "part" of the copy and Rene hitched a ride onto this dead horse. :rolleyes:

Thanks for the clarification of the public train of processes.
 
bknight said:
And thusly the "C" rock came to be, by a slight fiber becoming "part" of the copy and Rene hitched a ride onto this dead horse. :rolleyes:

Thanks for the clarification of the public train of processes.
Click to expand...

Have you happened upon the demand for a link to the "original" "undoctored" photographs?

How they think it is possible to link to physical film is puzzling to say the least.
 
abaddon said:
Have you happened upon the demand for a link to the "original" "undoctored" photographs?

How they think it is possible to link to physical film is puzzling to say the least.
Click to expand...

No I think the hoaxies pulled the old slight of hand attempting to indicate tat they were the originals.
 
I presume the 50th anniversary of the Moon Landing is why we are having such a upturn in Moonbat activity.
 
JayUtah said:
The real silly part of the hoax theory, of course, is that the proposed compositing method is too stupid for any actual process photographer to have actually contemplated.
Click to expand...

And the really, really silly part of the hoax theory is that it means that only the white stripes on the U.S. flag were composited into the images on some photos.
 
JayUtah said:
When the APS ignites, the flimsy Kapton sheet immediately disintegrates...
Click to expand...

I've been slumming YouTube comments for a while now, and in the comments section of a video of the Apollo 17 LM launching from the lunar surface, I've explained several times to various people that the "multicolored sparks/cheap fireworks" are actually scraps of Kapton insulation being blasted away by the APS and, because it's happening in a vacuum, flying away at high speed, moving so fast that the color wheel on the TV camera only exposes them in single colors of either red, blue or green.
 
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