ok, this may seem really dumb. i have no pro experience w/ photographic lighting of any kind so i could be completely off the wall here. but has anyone watched a marching band under the bright lights of a stadium? you look at that big block of people with all of those really bright lights on them. you notice shadows. a lot of them. for each person, there are several shadows on the field, one for each group of lights. so, if the moon photos were faked using several different light sources, wouldnt the lander, astronauts and each rock have several shadows going in several directions? since they each have just one shadow, wouldnt that prove that there was one light source? :-k just curious.

a good point that has come up many many times

on would hope that the HBs with all thier " common sense " would realise that one shadow = one light source and multiple lights = multiple shadows , but no

YRS - APE

Of course it would and that is one of the counter-arguments to the HB non parallel shadows claim. It doesn't do any good though. They just go on to say that the lights must have been really close to each object so NASA was smart enough to light every object so there was a wide field of light but not smart enough to line up the lights so the shadows were parallel...or something like that. So sad.

Welcome to the board BTW.

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Lighting a marching band (and their warm-up act, the football team) in a football stadium is an example of what lighting designers call a "wash". It has the same meaning as a wash in watercolor painting -- it's a broad application of even, reasonably non-directional illumination.

You accomplish a wash usually by a broad-beamed type of lighting instrument, such as scoops or fresnels or parcans, arranged in an array such that the soft-edged pools of light overlap. In a carefully established wash in the theater, often the beams just barely overlap. When that happens, a performer walks from beam to beam and the shadows "reset" themselves every time he crosses from beam to beam. You can see this yourself in a parking lot lit at night.

In a more dense wash, the pools overlap by half. You will always cast at least two shadows. In a football stadium the pools overlap by two-thirds or more.

Yes, you're quite right. In order to evenly light a broad expanse of terrain, a dense wash must be used. But that renders shadows cast by performers entirely unlike shadows you see in Apollo photographs. In order to get those shadows you can have only one light. But then your "set" is limited to the beam cast by that one light.

Here is our set in the desert.

http://www.clavius.org/img/desert-set.jpg

The single bright, unfiltered light is out of frame to the right. But you can see that only a little bit of the hillside is illuminated. The rest is pitch black.

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

Whoosh, mon, you walk the talk and talk the talk. Odd how many theater techs show up in places like science fiction and 3d art -- is astronomy another field that attracts us?


I have yet to see an HB'er willing to go beyond the idea that the shadows "look wrong" to postulate any way in which they could be formed. Sometimes they say "It was obviously studio lighting" but that's as far as they go.

We try to argue that anyone who had used their eyes on a scene lit by stage or studio lighting would be able to see that it doesn't match the moon shots. I think we are starting too far into the argument, though. First we would need to instil into the HB'ers the ability to see what is outside their own window. After all, they all seem to think that shadows are parrellel in the real world....

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"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

thanx for the help, i appreciate it. now, id like to present you with my main dilemma. in my technical report writing class, i am part of a group that will be writing out research paper on whether or not we went to the moon. for my part of the paper, i have to argue that we didnt land on the moon, which extremely tough since i already belive that NASA did put men on the moon. the research is easy, and ive finally figured out how the HBs come up with this stuff. youve gotta have a BS in BS to believe this crap, much less, come up w/ your own theories on it. i realize that this may seem stupid, but try to argue from the HBs point of view in an arguement sometime, but dont forget what you already know is tru, youll be debunking your own thoughts before you can get them out of your mouth. ](*,)

Might I suggest your teacher has the BS here? How could it profit a student to be forced to argue logically an argument to which there is no logic?

This isn't even as "meaty" as Creationism, where you can spin endless lies about silt layers and supernovae. The landings are so cut-and-dried it takes a creative monomaniac to come up with anything that looks suspect.

And as a further blow to anyone attempting to construct either a scientific paper, or even a decent creative writing essay, there IS NO ARGUMENT on the side of the HB'ers. They have no narrative, no fleshed-out hypothesis, no mechanisms. They play with a shotgun, seeing if they can make any holes in the narrative of the landings. They are shadow-boxing, shifting position moment to moment. There isn't a coherent, step-by-step argument to be had there.

I think a much better topic for the paper would be why your teacher is full of it. I'm sorry, but I find this an asinine assignment. Its only value is that it has caused you yourself to think and evaluate. Unfortunately, wandering into psuedo-science in this way (dividing the class to "debate" the subject) is only going to educate a minority. The majority will either discover plentiful new myths to be deluded by, or will make a haphazard job of describing the reality (as it will seem to them a pointless exercise). Neither will be convincing, but since psuedo-science thrives on any circulation, it will come out ahead.

This assumption that scientific facts are well approached in an adversarial, courtroom debate model, weakens science. It allows more politicization of science, increases the belief that management is capable of altering physical laws, and makes the fight against fake cancer cures and UFOs and other false science a matter of "who sounds the most convincing."

I would be interested in what Institute of Lower Learning has made this part of their syllabus.

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"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

maybe i should clarify. the teacher did not come up with the idea for the paper. one of the students did. he is part of the group, and all 6 of us (including the one who thought of the topic) believe that we did actually land on the moon. but to present an entirely unbiased view, both sides have to be covered. so three of us are arguing from the hoax side and the other 3 are arguing from the truth side. other groups are covering corporal punishment, spankings, xbox vs ps2, and other random ****. the students came up with these ideas, not the teacher. oh BTW, this is at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona, if there is anyone on campus that believes that NASA didnt go to the moon, they keep their mouths shut for their own personal safety.

Say....what would you think about doing a "Stealth" argument? Such as, "proving" in a few terse lines of figures that the natural background radiation of the Moon would have fried them.

And then, following presentation of the paper, revealing that you lied about the numbers (and rub their noses in the fact that no-one checked them).

Or if you have a taste for Feynman-like showmanship, bring up that old canard about the non-parallel shadows....and on the final day of class bring out a plaster-of-paris lunar surface model.


Right. Really, the only logical option at this point is to lie cheat and steal as bad as the actual HB'ers. With any luck you can be quite convincing. What continues to bother me, though, is that even if you reveal that you sent them hook line and sinker at least half the class will go home thinking "I bet there's something in that radiation thing anyhow." That's how psuedo-science works, after all...by spreading doubt.

(Note to the rest of the board -- I'm drawing again from my 1960 "Proceedings of the Sixth Annual Meeting of the American Astronautical Society" and a paper by John A. Barton that includes consideration the plausible nucliotides in the lunar rocks and concludes there is negligable hazard. It would take very little twisting to make it seem the moon is a uranium-littered death trap. And as few words to reveal the utter foolishness of that idea.)



Edit: Just read your last post. This is actually starting to sound interesting. One hopes the students there are smart enough to avoid the pitfalls of fuzzy thinking. The challenge before us, is...can we come up with something good enough to fool six engineering students?

Jay...I think this call's for you.

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"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Let me see if I understand the assignment - teams of students pick a controversial topic and then present both sides of the issue. As a technical report writing class, the intent is to practice research abilities, clarity of writing, and presentation format. Presenting the issue with balance is part of the assignment.

The Moon hoax may actually be a poor choice, from the standpoint of picking a debate topic. Debate typically works on subjective topics, issues of ambiguity, emotion, preference. Issues of fact don't work well for debate.

The Moon landings being a hoax is a topic for debate, but the facts are pretty strong against it, and the arguments for the hoax are weak. A fair hearing of the hoax arguments can quickly show they are faulty.

I see no need to create new arguments, though if you can go for it. However, if the intent is to practice your ability to research and report accurately, then making up data to fit your thesis is probably not a good idea. Unless you can demonstrate false techniques, and then enumerate them and why they are bad.

Yes the moon landing was faked..

But they went to the moon to do it.........

That was the gist of the Stanley Kubrick article. As it goes, Kubrick (a chronic perfectionist) was not satisifed with his ability to fake the moon landing visuals on Earth, so he finally insisted on shooting it on location on the moon in order to get it right.

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

From one frog to another, welcome to the board.

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By asking questions we sometimes get the wrong answers, from wrong answers we learn to ask the right questions.