View Single Post
  #7 (permalink)  
Old 22-March-2008, 11:38 AM
Kiwi Kiwi is offline
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: New Zealand
Posts: 484
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by Jairo View Post
Do you know what the white thing on the left of picture 5844 is? ...Conspiracists say it's a UFO or a hoax evidence.
Again, conspiracists show their incredible ignorance of Apollo. I'm reasonably certain it's a reflection in the window of a sunlit portion of Neil Armstrong's suit.

If it's an alien spacecraft, the lower right section bears a very strong resemblance to a domed flap the astronauts had near their biceps, but that's not their only domed flap. They had epaulets and others. And other parts of the UFO look a lot like wrinkles in a spacesuit. But if the conspiracists give UFO its true and proper meaning of Unidentified Flying Object, then it truly is one. Currently an unidentified man-made white object flying at great speed around the moon. If we identify it, it will then be an IFO.

There are plenty of examples of this sort of thing throughout the Apollo record -- the sun catching something inside the spacecraft and reflecting it in a window -- particularly on the 16mm film clips when the astronauts change the camera's settings. From memory there's a reflection of Buzz's suit and his motion when he changed the aperture around the time Neil stepped onto the lunar surface. He discussed this with Capcom Bruce McCandless:
109:23:25 McCandless: Buzz, this is Houston. F/2 (and)...
109:23:28 Armstrong: Okay, I'm at the...(Listens)
109:23:29 McCandless: ...1/160th second for shadow photography on the sequence camera.
109:23:35 Aldrin: Okay.

And I think I recall a reflection of Mike Collins's suit and his motion when he's filming the Lunar Module.

When examining this sort of thing, the best trick is to first look up any captions to try and find out where and when the photo was taken, and for this one the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal says:

AS11-40-5844 -- Craters 216 and 217 from lunar orbit prior to the landing.

I don't know exactly where those craters are, but as the sun appears to be high and a little ahead of the lunar module (casting slight shadows toward the camera), this indicates somewhere around the 90 degrees east mark, perhaps above the lunar farside or Smyth's Sea. Depending on the orientation of the spacecraft, a chink of sunlight might be coming through the overhead docking window or through the front windows. They didn't always fly "bottom down" as we can see in the rendezvous film for Apollo 11. The LM ascent stage came up toward the CSM "top down," with the top facing the lunar surface.

The next thing is to look at the flight journal or lunar surface journal to find out what was happening when the photo was taken, but after a quick search I couldn't find more about this particular photo, other than that Neil ran off three exposures in orbit, preparing the camera for use on the lunar surface. This was the first shot, the next one was of the earth, and the third was of the Messier Craters and includes in the distance Mount Marilyn, above which Powered Descent Initiation (the de-orbit burn for the landing) occurred.


Novaderrik: A post like that might not be helpful to someone like Jairo who, as he says in his signature, doesn't speak English and may not understand your joke. Even I don't understand a lot of American culture, and had to ask what a twinkie is and what handwaving and woo-woo mean. From Jairo's comments and questions here and at ApolloHoax it seems to me that he does an excellent job of debunking the moonlanding hoax on bulletin boards in Brazil, so I believe he deserves all the constructive help we can give him.

Last edited by Kiwi : 22-March-2008 at 12:39 PM.
Reply With Quote