JREF, Mythbusters, and Phil Plait---together at last!

NobbyNobbs

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NobbyNobbs
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Apr 2, 2006
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Check it out---JREF, Mythbusters, and Phil Plait, all mentioned in the same paragraph of the same article!


"I was actually first involved with the Mythbusters early on, when I was contacted by one of their producers asking if I had any astronomical myths for them to bust," shared Dr. Phil Plait, a.k.a. "The Bad Astronomer", in an interview with collectSPACE.com. An astronomer who worked with the Hubble Telescope, Plait created a website, Bad Astronomy, aimed at dispelling astronomy and science based myths, including the moon hoax, which expanded into books and his recent appointment as president of the James Randi Educational Foundation.
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(This is a yahoo news item...maybe someone with more internet-fu can post a more permanent link.)
 
wollery said:
Well, I can't actually read the link, the Great Firewall of China doesn't seem to like it for some reason, but more than one site gives this url as the source of the item - http://www.collectspace.com/news/news-082608a.html
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Obviously the Chinese government wants to block the US moon landings from the collective conscious of it's people so they can claim to be the first ones there in a few years.

Maybe I've been in the CT forum too long. That came too easily ...
 
All mythbusters proved was that you could make a set that looks exactly like the one they faked the moon landing with. All the way up to and including using the vomit comet to film them walking around which was then composited in using secret alien computer technology.
 
NewtonTrino said:
All mythbusters proved was that you could make a set that looks exactly like the one they faked the moon landing with. All the way up to and including using the vomit comet to film them walking around which was then composited in using secret alien computer technology.
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Ah, but what they disproved was a lot of moon hoax CT crap. For instance, they disproved the claim that the only way to produce non-parallel shadows was by using multiple light sources. They disproved the claim that the footage of astronauts cavorting on the moon was simply slowed-down film of them walking in 1 G. They disproved the theory that the only way for the flag to "flutter" as it did was by having a breeze blow on it. And so on. And oh yeah, they confirmed the existence of pesky reflectors someone or something left on the moon, the ones that CTers always seem to forget about.

I know that die-hard moon hoaxers will just say "See! This proves that you can fake a moon landing!" But that was never the point behind this Mythbusters episode. They demonstrated -- with what I think was devastating effect -- that some of the more popular reasons CTers cite for believing it was a hoax are in fact completely bogus.
 
The only thing I don't think they did well was the shadow photography. Hoaxers also say that atmospheric scattering contributed to the backfill of light (or has that been discarded?), so they should have photographed that in vacuum as well.

I even did the surface integral some time ago using a 10% albedo to figure out the expected lighting in shadow. But then found out that the regolith is itself a bunch of corner-reflectors. So there is a bias in the re-scattered light back towards the light source. That causes the halo effect when an astronaut takes a picture of his own shadow, and why the full moon is much brighter than twice the brightness of a half-moon.

It's also why a low-hanging sun would have a big back-scattering effect in the shadowed area.
 
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