You're right -- "any idiot" can see that it's waving, which means that such a person, though he/she be an idiot, is still smarter than me, since to me the flag looks like it's wrinkled rather than waving. At least my empty head is easy to carry around!

That is such a fantastic photo although it really should have been taken from the other side so you could see Buzz(?) saluting. Still, it's like you're standing right there.

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You're a coward and a liar and a thOOF - Bart Sibrel

If you look at the hires version and that of the following photo, you'll clearly see a) they are wrinkled and b) the wrinkles are exactly the same in both photos (well, any self respecting hoax believer will point out that they doctored the same picture of the flag in different pictures of Aldrin).

http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/as11-40-5874HR.jpg
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/as11-40-5875HR.jpg

Some years ago, I combined them into an animated GIF for the ALSJ:
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/as11-40-5874-75.gif

Harald

PS: Don't miss Aldrin peeking towards Armstrong in the second picture.

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"Flying in space is risky business, but just staying on this planet is risky business too." - John Young, astronaut

Coooool, it's the Aldrin Shuffle. This picture is also proof of the moon wobbling as far back as 1969.

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Howling from the Shadows

It must be fun to lead a life completely unburdened by reality. --- JayUtah

You can't reason an irrational person out of an irrational belief. --- Noclevername

Apollo: The History and the Hoax
Enter the World of Athran

Well Jay, I've done a double-take on that show and what you to prove there was only one light source. Yes, you did prove there was probably only one light source (if there had been more wouldn't have there been some double or multiple-direction shadows of the same object?) but, as the same time, you also inadvertantly helped prove the HBer's case for them.

Firstly, you have demonstrated (to me in any case) the reason for the different-angled shadows is not that there is only one light source (this has been a bad assumption made by HBers) but rather the proximity of the source. The articifial studio light you used was a very short distance away (just a few feet or perhaps a bit more? - enlighten me) thus making shadowing very sensitive to where any particular object is in relation to the angle and distance of the light source. On the other hand, the "real" photos are supposed to have been taken with only one light source millions of miles away. So there is certainly not going to be the same sensitivity of each object to the angle and distance to the sun. Therefore your experiment in this matter is invalid and null-and-void because you didn't really recreate the conditions which the moon shots were supposed to have been taken in - one light source millions of miles away.

The same applies to all the other things you showed - the reflection of light bouncing off the surface, why the flag is "lit up" on both sides, the quality of taking the photos themselves - in fact, what you've actually proved Jay, is just how it could have all been done artificially since that is exactly what you did yourself. The quality of the photos you produced look very close (from what we could see) to what the "real" moon shots photos look like!

To prove the shadow business at least, you should have set up all the same stuff during the day (as well as? or instead of?) with only the sun as your light source and taken some photos and then we could see how the shadows behaved which would have given a fairer assessment of what you were trying to prove.

Jay, I hope that leg isn't going to take too much strain from all that limping around you're going to be doing since you appear to have well and truly shot yourself in the foot with this one!

Did you miss the examples of shadows in sun-light?

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papageno


"Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous?" - Hobbes (Calvin and Hobbes)

"It's all about context!" - Vince Noir (The Mighty Boosh)

"I've never heard of such a brutal and shocking injustice that I cared so little about!" - Zapp Brannigan (Futurama)

Rusty, I'm beginning to believe that you won't be "happy" with any explaination unless we actually return to the Moon to "recreate" conditions there.

You seem to be conveniently ignoring the examples on Clavius which were taken during the day.

Can you explain exactly how the proximity of light affects how light is reflected from a surface. This is a very intriguing theory.

Can you explain exactly how the proximity of light affects how nylon can be backlit?

While I'm sure that Jay will correct me, IIRC the light was over 100 feet away, not exactly what would be considered "close proximity." The experiment was set up so that at the distance the set was from the light, the light -WOULD- act like the sun as its rays would be parallel. Your argument also loses something major when the shadows of the crew appeared to be pointing inwards. Any proximity effect would force the shadows outwards. It is impossible to get converging shadows like those shown in the photos with a single light source which shows that it is a property of perspective, not real direction.

One of the very interesting things that was shown on the set was that even thugh the crew was using the most powerful light available, way more powerful than anything round in the late 60's early 70's, the light still only lit up a small area. As soon as you looked at the areas outside of where the light was directly pointed, it was dark. When you compare this with the Apollo photos you can see that this isn't the case, the areas that are obvious lit are huge (hence the HB's claims of multiple lights) and there is no way they could possibly be lit by a single light source unless it was huge, like the sun.

Far from having shot Jay having himself in the foot, the experiments showed up the HB's claims as total rubbish while showing at the same time that it couldn't have been done the way the crew of the doco did it either. With the Multiple light theory gone, the single studio light obviously nowhere powerful enough, that leaves just one answer. The photos were take on the Moon and the light source was the Sun.

The only way you can possibly miss this conclusion is to deliberatly ignore the facts, though I guess that is something HB's are pretty good at.

__________________
Howling from the Shadows

It must be fun to lead a life completely unburdened by reality. --- JayUtah

You can't reason an irrational person out of an irrational belief. --- Noclevername

Apollo: The History and the Hoax
Enter the World of Athran

Y'mean... like this?

__________________
"Earth diameter is 7,900 miles, and Moon diameter is 2,160 miles. It takes on average 90 minutes to complete one Earth orbit, so one Moon orbit should take roughly 25 minutes." - Sam "NasaScam" Colby

Bearer of the highly coveted "I found Venus in nine Apollo photos" sweatsocks.

DataCable^2008 A+

Firstly, you have demonstrated (to me in any case) the reason for the different-angled shadows is not that there is only one light source (this has been a bad assumption made by HBers) but rather the proximity of the source.

Nope. You're changing horses. The conspiracists say those shadows can "only" be made by having more than one light source. I proved they can't. And most of the reason for setting the light up that way was to demonstrate indirect illumination, not shadow directions.

The articifial studio light you used was a very short distance away...

175-200 feet, depending on which shot you're talking about.

...thus making shadowing very sensitive to where any particular object is in relation to the angle and distance of the light source.

Prove it.

Here's a problem most of the people here on this board can solve. I want you to solve it in order to prove to me you're not just handwaving.

Let's say I have a flat level piece of ground. Let's say I hammer two poles into the ground straight up, so that 5 feet of each sticks up out of the ground, and they're 20 feet apart. Let's say there's a light 200 feet away along a line perpendicular to the line between the two poles such that each pole casts a shadow 15 feet long.

1. What is my artificial light's elevation angle in this problem?

2. As seen from above, what is the difference in azimuth angle between the shadows cast by two poles?

3. Now assume the same two poles are lit by the sun at the same elevation angle from an azimuth direction perpendicular to the line between them, so that their shadows on this flat, level ground are parallel as seen from above. What is the angular difference between each pole's shadow as cast by the sun and the shadow that was cast by the artificial light? What is the linear distance between the tips of the shadow as cast by the sun and the shadow as cast by the light?

This isn't just make-work. This is the geometrical basis outlined in your rebuttal. I want to make sure you understand your own argument, so you have to answer this.

Therefore your experiment in this matter is invalid and null-and-void because you didn't really recreate the conditions ...

You wish. Do the math to prove our experiment was invalid. Until you do so, I'll assume you're just grasping at straws, as usual. See, I have done the math, and I'll be happy to do it for you as soon as you admit you can't.

The same applies to all the other things you showed - the reflection of light bouncing off the surface, why the flag is "lit up" on both sides, the quality of taking the photos themselves

Not in the least.

The reflection shows that by using only one, directional light source, indirect lighting can occur by diffuse interreflection. This directly disproves the contention that "fill" lighting must be used.

The flag is being lit by one light source 200 feet away. The fact that you can stand behind it and see it "glow" proves that no fill lighting is required.

What we have proved is that the conspiracy theorists' proposed "tests" for determining whether photographs are real or genuine are based on faulty assumptions and do not really incorporate the way light actually behaves. Whether those tests are made with one artificial light or one natural light is immaterial. The conspiracists have said that it's "obvious" more than one light has been used.

As for the quality of the photographs, you are mistaken again. I was given the modern equivalent of the Apollo camera, a Hasselblad MK70 from which the viewfinder had been removed. I was not given an exposure meter. I was not allowed to measure the distance in any way except to estimate it. I was not allowed to shoot any test frames or practice with the camera in any way other than to examine it ahead of time to familiarize myself with its controls. Yet I was able to take properly exposed, properly framed, properly focused shots. Imagine how much better I could be if I, like the astronauts, were given months to practice.

...in fact, what you've actually proved Jay, is just how it could have all been done artificially since that is exactly what you did yourself.

But that's only because you've changed the argument. The argument we were trying to disprove is that it requires multiple light sources to accomplish what was done. What we have shown is that the conspiracy theorists do not understand the behavior of light and shadow well enough to be able to look at some candidate photo and determine on that basis whether it was real or fake.

To prove the shadow business at least, you should have set up all the same stuff during the day (as well as? or instead of?) with only the sun as your light source and taken some photos and then we could see how the shadows behaved which would have given a fairer assessment of what you were trying to prove.

I did. Several of the photos appear on my web site.

...since you appear to have well and truly shot yourself in the foot with this one!

You may gloat after you demostrate that your argument has the mathematical basis you claim.

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

It is impossible to get converging shadows like those shown in the photos with a single light source which shows that it is a property of perspective, not real direction.

I've shown time and again that the conspiracists' notions of what proximal and artificial lights would do is really the opposite of what those lights actually do. That's why the conspiracists never go out and try to duplicate the lighting setups they say were used. If they did, they'd disprove their own theories. So from them you get only handwaving and diagrams instead of any actual evidence.

One of the very interesting things that was shown on the set was that even thugh the crew was using the most powerful light available, way more powerful than anything round in the late 60's early 70's, the light still only lit up a small area.



The light is way out of frame to the right. You could get 18kW lights in the 1960s and 1970s, but they were larger than ours.

__________________
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

Rusty, you're making a couple of very key errors.

First, you're adopting the method that Bennett and Percy have used for years now in order to try to defuse attempts to prove their theories wrong. You have raised the issue of infidelity in the demonstration as an excuse for why the demonstration doesn't contradict the conspiracy theory. Unless you can describe specifically what effect the point of infidelity has on the conspiracy theory and the test at hand, you're doing nothing more than handwaving -- scramlbing to find any reason to discount the test, whether relevant or not.

The ability of us and others to separate the various conspiracist claims into individually testable units, and to test them under more controlled circumstances, is exactly what makes our approach scientific and theirs not. It demonstrates that we understand the underlying physical principles whereas the conspiracists can only see the combined effects and speculate as to specific cause. Our understanding is analytical while theirs is merly comparative.

For example, to test the interreflection principle, all that is required is a solitary, directional light source. It doesn't matter whether the source is local or infinitely distant, or whether it's natural or artificial. It only matters that all other light sources are eliminated. A spotlight 150 feet away will produce interreflection results that are qualitatively equivalent to the sun in space. The shape of the shadow of our test object (in our case, a small rock) may be ever so slightly different because the light source is local, but in that case the error falls below the jitter introduced by the texture of the ground.

The blind handwaving to the locality of the light source as somehow invalidating that part of the experiment is unsatisfactory. A specific objection is required, involving acceptable principles of photometry to illustrate why, specifically, the demonstration fails.

Here's a simple scenario to illustrate your error. Let's say your foot hurts and so you go to the doctor. You don't understand everything he does in his examination, but you know some things generally because you've been to the doctor before. He gives you a thorough examination but is unable to diagnose your foot pain. He suggests you come back in a week for more testing. Later, upon discussing the matter with a friend who is a nurse, you discover that the doctor performed your ear examination incorrectly. Since you don't really know anything about medicine, you suspect that maybe if the ear examination had been done correctly, the diagnosis would have been possible. But that's really very unlikely. Your foot hurts likely because of something wrong with your foot, not your ear. So whether the ear was examined correctly or not really doesn't matter.

In order to argue that the botched ear examination affected the foot diagnosis, you require a specific testable theory of how they are connected. Such as, "Examining the ear reveals irregularities in blood flow in small capillaries; this indicates poor circulation, such as in diabetes, and that is often a cause of pain in the extremities. Had the ear examination been done correctly, it may have led the doctor to suspect poor circulation."

This is how you (and Percy and Bennett) approach the problem of contradictory evidence. If the experiment wasn't done perfectly, according to every aspect you (and they) think "must" be important, then the entire experiment is simply discounted as invalid without any further analysis. First you have to explain why your idea of what constitutes a correct experiment is actually meaningful. Then you have to show why an infidelity of the experiment, as measured by your criteria, is meaningful.

Second, you approach the question with the (wrong) presumption that I must prove, or am trying to prove, that faking the photography in a studio is impossible. That is not at all what I'm trying to show. I don't have to show it was impossible to argue that it just wasn't done that way.

The "rules" that Percy and others have put forward (e.g., shadows cast by the sun must be parallel, sunlight is always even across a flat surface) are attempts to devise tests by which photographs taken in natural sunlight can be distinguished from photographs taken in the studio. Then they try to apply these tests to Apollo photographs. The photographs "fail" the "test" and therefore are discounted as not possible in natural sunlight.

Unfortunately nowhere do the authors test the tests. We are left with their word that light and shadow behave the way they say they do in natural lighting as well as differently, as claimed, in the studio.

Our goal here is simply to show that the tests these authors propose, really don't do a very good job of distinguishing natural light from artificial light. In many cases we can go out into natural light and take pictures that "break" their rules for natural light. This shows that their test doesn't work. We can also put up artificial lights as they suggest and show that their statements about artificial light are wrong too.

The reasoning goes like this. If the photograph doesn't obey the rules for natural light, then there is no other possibility than that the photo was taken with artificial light. Notice how there is no proof for artificial light; just the suggestion that it "must" be artificial because the only other possibility has been eliminated.

Now to be fair, after the author has drawn the conclusion he sometimes goes back and, with diagrams and handwaving, tries to show that the behavior of light seen in the photos is somehow indicative or characteristic of artificial lighting. But half the time he gets those characteristics wrong, and the other half he doesn't tell you whether natural light would behave that same way.

It matters not one single bit that we can sometimes convincingly recreate natural lighting in artificial surroundings. I can make "sunlight" very convincingly on a stage with my trusty globe grid and some shower curtains. In fact, it works to our advantage because it gives pretty convincing evidence that you can't tell natural light from artificial light in a photograph just by looking at the photograph. And that's what the conspiracists want you to believe: that they can pick up any random photograph and, by application of their "rules", tell you whether that photo's lighting environment is natural or artificial.

We've proven they can't. Therefore the arguments they base on those "rules" are hogwash.

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

I'm assuming you mean the linear distance between the tip of one of the shadows caused by sulight and the tip of the nearest shadow caused by the artificial light?

0.7493 feet?

Got tired of waiting to see if Rusty was going to give an answer...

You're right, the mathematical calculations are beyond my knowledge right now or at least i think they are. Mathematics is one of my strong points but I'm a little rusty, particulalry with applied mathematical theory.

What I will say is this - you say that even with powerful lighting from 100 feet you couldn't get it to light up very much but the point is, if done in some kind of artifical setting (studio or desert) the lighting wouldn't be anywhere near as much as 100 feet away, but alot less. Surely the lighting would be strong enough at that distance.

Mate - you need to actually read the replies that Jay has clearly spent some considerable time on.

The arguments that are usually put forward state that the Apollo photos show shadows that fall incorrectly for a single, distant light source. They also state that shadows should not be backfilled sufficiently to allow detail to be photographed. Both claims are nonsense. What Jay and the film crew did was show that a single distant light source will permit backlighting of shadows, and will produce shadows that the HB's incorrectly regard as anomalous. The set up was not designed to show how the missions could have been hoaxed, it was designed to show that the claims of abnormal backlighting & shadows were without basis.

If you want to argue closer lights - go ahead. But now the onus falls on you to explain the lack of multiple shadows, sharply defined shadow edges, lack of multiple light sources in reflective surfaces, etc etc etc.

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"I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day." - Douglas Adams

And I said quite specifically in an earlier post, but perhaps I didn't emphasise it enough, that the mistake HBers have made is assuming two source of light.

I believe there was only one because, if you were going to fake it, you would want to try to simulate the sun. As an aside though, wouldn't the Earth be a second source of light - or is it not strong enough? I honestly don't know, this is a legitimate question.

In fact, I think the problem with many HBs (including myself) is that we have been misinformed by these HB "leaders", as it were, who have stated faulty arguments which have rightly been shot down as being flawed. In fact, I wonder that they aren't disinformation agents being used, either knowingly or unknowingly, to make it look as if the idea of the moon landings being a hoax, is in itself a hoax.

The problem with HBers is not so much a belief in a hoax, but why they belive it. They believe it for the wrong reasons (faulty arguments). The right questions haven't been asked and the wrong evidence has been presented.

I believe there is something very suspect about the Apollo missions, but to be honest, it is perhaps beyond my knowledge to present feasable arguments that would stand up to the high standards and scrutiny of this board. So I think I should just leave this for now. However, I put it to you that only one source of light was needed to fake the landings.

What I DO believe, is that this pro vs anti Apollo war is deliberately perpetuated or encouraged by NASA to sm