I searched this forum, and it seems there is no conclusive picture that shows visible stars from the surface of the moon. I understand and agree with why this is true, but I believe I have found a photo taken from the moon that shows one faint star or planet.

I got it off of www.apolloarchive.com and the photo is coded AS11-40-5906. It's from Apollo 11 but I'm not sure who took the picture. It's a new photo and was posted on 07/09/2004. Here's the link from a mirror site: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/Hi...-40-5906HR.jpg I have been looking over the photos of this and other missions, but alas I have found no more examples. Perhaps a more vigorous search could produce more examples.

The spot to look for is on the extreme right-hand edge. This is a soft-focus glow with a bluish tint. There is another curious spot above and to the left of that one that is a more focused, tiny white dot. More on this spot later.

In what photos I did search, there were many cases of careless scanning with dust fragments on the surface of the photo. A good example of this is a photo from Apollo 17 coded AS17-146-2229: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/Hi...46-22296HR.jpg The sky in this image is littered with dust, although admittedly this photo was scanned in 12/09/1998. The compelling thing is how the fragments obviously look like dust. The blue light in the Apollo 11 image doesn't seem like dust.

Now, for the tiny white dot. I feel this IS some sort of photo imperfection since a nearly identical spot can be found in the astronaut's shadow below on the left-hand side near his waist. That seems to explain that spot.

But what about the blue dot?
- I feel I have shown it to not be dust on the scan.
- If it were a photo imperfection, I think it would look like other imperfections in the same photo, at least in color and focus.
- As far as other photographic anomalies, I'll leave that to the experts on the forums to decide.

I have read in this forum that a planet or bright star may have been visible under the photographic conditions there. Is this a possible candidate? What we need to do is find another example from that mission.

Well if you look at at the astronaut's shadow you will see a similar bluish dot around his waistline to the left. That's enough for me to rule out a star.

Is there an echo in here? I believe I mentioned that spot and equated it with the tiny white dot near the top. It doesn't seem like the bluish one at all.

But what about the blue dot?
- I feel I have shown it to not be dust on the scan.

Well, you've suggested that it doesn't look like other specks on other scans, but that's not the same as falsifying the notion that it's dust on the scan.

Before you leave dust altogether, consider that it may be a speck of dust that was on the original transparency while it was in the camera, dust on the reseau plate, or dust on the lens. The bluish cast to me suggests scattering (blue light scatters better than red light), which in turn suggests something that happened when the photo was taken, not when it was scanned. It may very well be on the original transparency, but not everything on the transparency has to be explained by something in the scene that was photographed.

- If it were a photo imperfection, I think it would look like other imperfections in the same photo, at least in color and focus.

This presumes you can know in advance what all applicable "photo imperfections" look like. The most you can say is that it doesn't share the same properties as other observations you've made, which you've hypothesized are photo imperfections. It may be a different type of photo imperfection.

I have read in this forum that a planet or bright star may have been visible under the photographic conditions there. Is this a possible candidate?

No, not really. Planets and bright stars are not generally photographable under those conditions. The brightest pixel in that pattern has a 67% luminosity, indicating a substantial exposure. The biggest problem in trying to explain specks as photographed distant celestial phenomena is naming one that will significantly expose Ektachrome E-3 ISO 160 film at f/11 and 1/250 second.

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Oops I missed that, sorry, I need to start reading the post I'm replying to a few times so I catch all the details.

Looks blue to me allright. Not as clear blue as the larger dot, but still. I zoomed in with a picture editing program, and sure thing, it's blue.

It doesn't seem like the bluish one at all.

Actually, if you look closely all your dots are blue or bluish-green. The one near the right edge is just large enough to see without magnification.

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JayUtah: I feel by your tone that you think I am trying to present my opinions as fact. I am not. I am fully aware of the limitless things I do not know or understand. Hence my use of the words "I feel" and "I think" to convey opinion.

To explain it using statistical terms, I did my best to show that there is not enough evidence to reject my hypothesis, given the limited amount of evidence I have at my disposal. If you want to bring more detailed information to the table and show that the hypothesis should be rejected, then please do so. I just don't need to hear variations of "It might not be true" since it serves no purpose as doubt is inherent in the posing of the question. So is that’s it? It's not possible? Not even a bright star or planet? I've never heard that strong of a conclusion before on this topic. Is your evidence enough to support your conclusion? You make statements about luminosity and exposure, but you don’t actually lead me to your conclusion (at least not in an obvious way). I’m sorry if your conclusion has been spelled out in another thread, but at least a link to where this is explained would be courteous. Uh, I have looked closely in my web browser, Paint, and in Photoshop. The one near the top edge seems to be tinted in color very close to the basic color of the surface of the moon. I don't see blue at all in it. Photoshop has the colors of the central pixel to be R: 113 G: 130 B: 124. True, there is more blue and green to the color, but it is such a small amount as to not be noticeable. It is basically grey. For reference, a similarly shaded spot from the surface came out as R: 141 G: 153 B: 143. Again, more green and blue, but no one can say the surface of the moon is bluish!

The "blue dot" seems to be strikingly blue. Photoshop has the brightest pixel at R: 88 G: 166 B: 255. Now that’s blue. Again, I could be wrong, but is it possible you may not be a perfect judge of color either with whatever tools you are using to view the image. Anyway, naming one the blue one is just for reference. Saying they're all somehow shaded blue isn't very useful.

And I’m sorry if it seems like I’m attacking you. That is not my intention. I just want to have a scientific discussion on this subject and I don’t want the debate to end prematurely. You came on strong trying to negate my points and I felt a strong response was justified. I meant no offense.

Personally, I’m waiting for examples of some photographic evidence to either support or refute this possibility.

Actually I've discussed the moon's real colour, and people did indeed claim it was bluish. It really depends on how the pictures were developed. Here is an example. Picture # AS12-46-6719. Tell me if that isn't more blue than gray.

Looks almost purplish to me.

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Man, people are argumentative about this subject!

I suppose I should have qualified my statement about the moon not being bluish with “in this picture”. Should I also add the caveat “and provided you’re not wearing blue-tinted Bram Stoker’s Dracula glasses”?!?

If you look at that same picture in the bottom right (right and above the reticule) there's another blue dot...

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Nice spotting there Jim. That's a wrap.

I feel by your tone that you think I am trying to present my opinions as fact. I am not.

My apologies -- I got no such impression. My impression was that you were legitimately trying to apply some sort of fact-based decision-making process to arrive at a supportable conclusion, or at least to eliminate the impossible or unlikely. My comments were intended to sharpen the line between what you can know and what you cannot know based on your observations.

If you want to bring more detailed information to the table and show that the hypothesis should be rejected, then please do so.

It's less about that and more about the process by which you've eliminated competing hypotheses: dust, damage, etc. I'm not trying to be argumentative nor to argue for the sake of argument. The most common mistake people make in an investigation is to prematurely rule out possibilities using limited falsifying arguments. Conspiracy theorists do this on purpose in order to create bogus indirect proofs. I'm not saying that you're doing this on purpose. We all do it by accident because we perceive that it's a shortcut if we eliminate certain possibilities early.

You want to rule out dust. I don't yet think you have enough information to do that. You want to rule out other forms of damage or contamination. I don't think there's enough information to do that either. You want to consider starlight, but it turns out that's pretty easy to falsify -- the easiest of all your candidate hypotheses.

I just don't need to hear variations of "It might not be true" since it serves no purpose as doubt is inherent in the posing of the question.

True, but if there is sufficient doubt in your falsifying arguments, then the conclusions that they are supposed to falsify have to be put back on the table. That's why we bring them up.

So is that’s it? It's not possible? Not even a bright star or planet? I've never heard that strong of a conclusion before on this topic.

Frankly I've never heard it said on this forum that stars would be within the dynamic range of this photography. We're all pretty strongly of the conclusion that they would not be.

Is your evidence enough to support your conclusion?

Yes. It's empirical. I've pointed that type of camera at the sky using that type of film and done it from the high deserts of the U.S. Even with much longer exposures than Apollo's I can't get stars on that type of film. Not at 67% density, not even at 1% density.

You make statements about luminosity and exposure, but you don’t actually lead me to your conclusion (at least not in an obvious way).

Let me try to fill in the gaps.

If a certain type of film is exposed to a density of 67%, and we know -- or can reconstruct -- the conditions under which that film was exposed, we can draw conclusions about the brightness of the light. The general down-sun photography rule for Apollo is f/11 at 1/250 second. This is consistent with daylight photography using ISO 160 film -- taking pictures of things that are lit by the sun. The dynamic range of the film at that setting equates to a certain range of incoming radiant energy in the visible spectrum: the lower limit at which the film is barely exposed, and the upper limit at which the film is saturated and no longer responds to light.

We can directly compare this spot to others in the scene whose radiant intensity is computable, such as the sunlit lunar surface. If a pixel on the lunar surface is exposed to a density of 67%, we can assume that's because we're getting just as much light from that surface as from the "object" out there. And since we can figure out how much sunlight comes to us from that one pixel of lunar surface, we can show that it far exceeds that which is possible to get from a star or planet -- by orders of magnitude, in fact.

But we don't need to get all excited about radiometry. That's a scientific approach. We can use a purely empirical approach that's often more intuitive.

That is, get a Hasselblad 70mm camera with a Biogon lens and load it up with Ektachrome 160 film. Then go out to where the sky is clear and the stars are bright (e.g., the California desert) and attenuated only a very little bit in the visible spectrum by the air. Set your exposure to 1/60 at f/5.6 (several times the light-gathering power of the Apollo 11 exposure). Now take pictures of the sky. If your blue spot is a star, you'd expect to see many more of them under these photographic conditions.

Then, as an experiment, see how far you have to go in order to get stars to show up at 67% density on your film -- to the point where you know they're stars and not dust or whatever. When you discover that you have to use exposures of 15 seconds just to get stars to show up at all, and exposures of up to a minute to get something like 67% on the same type film, you see that stars really have brightnesses that are orders of magnitude dimmer than what would expose the film at Apollo settings.

There is an analytical method to justify this conclusion, and there is an empirical method. And both tell us that stars simply won't show up in Apollo photography. It's as conclusive as a proposition can get.

The 67% density figure comes from standard conversions from RGB space into an average luminosity across the visible spectrum regardless of actual wavelength, weighted by the eye's response. (It would be better to weight it by the film's response, but I don't know those weighting factors off the top of my head.) Besides, most image analysis programs already have the standard human optical methods encoded.

Anyway, naming one the blue one is just for reference. Saying they're all somehow shaded blue isn't very useful.

It is if you're planning to distinguish one from the other by coloration. If they all have color then you can't as effectively argue that the "blue" one is different from the "gray" ones and therefore likely to have a different cause. And since one of those spots is clearly not a star, this is important to considering whether the blue one is or isn't a star.

Clearly the one within the shadow was not caused by starlight. If you can't strongly argue that the blue spot and the shadow spot have different causes, then you can't strongly falsify that the blue spot can't have been caused by various artificial or accidental means.

The colors in the lunar surface pixels are less useful as baselines because they may be subject to error-propagation. When you scan something, the scanner can't always represent a color accurately within the given color space. So the error between the actual color and the encoded color is carried into the next pixel so that the average of the two encoded pixels more closely approximates the average of the two original samples. A better method of getting a baseline color from the image is sampling several pixels of the same optical density and inferring color trends from that.

But that type of error propagation is less defensible for pixels surrounded entirely by black. They are more likely to illustrate actual colors.

And I’m sorry if it seems like I’m attacking you. That is not my intention.

And it's not my intention to appear overly defensive or overly dismissive. I'm trying to point out what I see as flaws in your argument, but with the intention of helping you to improve it and make it useful to you.

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Looks almost purplish to me.

One of the few advantages to being colorblind is that I can bypass arguments about color. The color commonly alleged to be "purple" usually looks blue to me.

Photo AS11-40-5906 is part of Aldrin's +Y pan. Photo AS11-40-5907 was the next frame and overlaps the right edge of 5906. I don't see a spot in 5907.

Note: according to the A11 exposure decal, Aldrin would have changed f-stop between the images (I think).

Looks to me (i.e., eyeballing it) like he did stop it up one stop between photos.

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Bless you all for your quick and decisive investigation!

That dot in the lower right was a nice catch. I never thought to see if I could make out any similar imperfections in the surface portions of the photo.

And JayUtah made some good points too...

Seriously, that was interesting stuff. Perhaps this community could put together a comprehesive document on this subject with snippets like this from all over this forum? I don't know if this forum has sticky threads, but some way of gathering the information on points that come up often would be a boon. My own forum (not on astronomy) has essentially a FAQ for each forum. For this forum, each possible claim of the moon hoax folks (c) could be it's own thread or document so to keep it small enough to tackle easily. Then one main thread could be an index and describe and link each sub-topic (and then stickied to the top of the foum if possible). Projects like that really bring a community together.

Lastly, thank you for your patience. JayUtah is a gentleman and obviously a scholar.

That looks exactly like a dead pixel.

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Dead pixels tend to limit themselves to individual pixels. These artifacts are, in each case, composed of several pixels. Dead pixels that get transformed into many pixels due to interpolated enlargements tend to enlarge uniformly or in some other way that belies an algorithm. The smoothing around these spots indicates they were sampled, not interpolated.

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BTW thanks WGW. I love this sort of stuff. Any excuse to have a really good look at a few photos is fine by me.

P.

Johnno, I don't think you can take the color in that picture as representative of true color. That image from ALSJ is one of the quick scans from a slide. The projection quality on a lot of those is bad. I tried to find the equivalent on Kipp Teague's Apollo Archive, but it isn't posted there. The actual photo number is AS12-46-6719. Notice how the color bears no resemblance to the surface color in the other images in this thread, such as the one by WGW.

My point exactly, but other people have used pictures like the one in question as "proof" that the moon is actually blue.

Am I missing something or what?

Why would any photograph taken to give sharp focus to foreground objects show point light sources at infinity? This is quite apart from the exposure issues that have been cooked to a cinder by now.

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It's not clear what the focus setting was for this photo. There were three focus detents on the ring for doing zone focusing, and the astronauts normally enjoyed considerable depth of field. Plus, looking at the one large spot, you could argue it's out of focus.

One of the focus detents was at the 10- or 12-meter setting, if I recall correctly. With down-sun exposure settings you could probably get a 3-5 meter depth of field on either side of the in-focus plane, and I think that would probably account for this photo. Craig Lamson actually did the math on this some time ago and figured the entire focus range of the Biogon could be handled in three zones plus infinity. That corresponds to the settings on the lens.

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