But being a huge NASA freak myself, I *know* there was no secondary source of light on the Moon, other than the Sun high above.
But apparently being relatively inexperienced with the notion of diffuse reflection, he didn't understand that one primary source can be reflected in numerous ways to provide secondary sources.
In another image, it shows a view of an Apollo 15 astronaut and two pictures of an Apollo 17 astronaut with a very large glare on his glass face shield, the glare taking up damn near his entire face.
Those are frames from the video downlink, with the lens zoomed in pretty far.
Yet he also showed me and the others pictures of a Shuttle Astronaut and Ed White -- during his Gemini EVA -- and the Sun's reflection was just a pinprick of light on the shield.
And those are images recorded on film with the camera right in the astronaut's face.
Vidicon tubes record light differently than film. Further, the saturation level of a vidicon is pretty low, as is the recovery latency. Anyone who has studied the optics of a convex reflector knows what's going on. And if you haven't studied that, just look at the sun reflecting off the chrome of a faraway car. The sunburst might seem to occupy the entire chrome feature. But if you get your face right up close to it, you see that the sunburst is just a tiny spot of light.
The difference is distance. The zoom lens does not make up for the distance. It merely narrows the field of view. Scatter effects that depend on distance are not affected by zooming in, but they are affected by getting closer to the subject.
For example, there's another famous picture of the astronaut peering down into the camera with the American flag and Earth all within the frame. Problem is, the Apollo EVA suit couldn't bend at the waist, so how did Neil shoot the picture?
The more interesting question is how did Neil shoot the picture when he was on earth at the time? To be more specific, the photo is the famous one shot of Apollo 17 LMP Jack Schmitt by commander Gene Cernan. There is no "one" lunar surface EMU. The J-mission suits were quite a bit different than those used by Apollo 11. The astronauts would have looked pretty silly trying to sit in the lunar rover if their suits couldn't bend at the waist. In other words, the J-mission suit could certainly bend at the waist.
The rest is just the unthinking regurgitation of the standard David Percy arguments. Eerie indeed.
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