I noticed that a guy with the handle "abductboy" has created a Fake Moon Landings photo gallery at:

http://community.webshots.com/album/35183124ALDYVW

First you will encounter a total of 9 thumbnails, so you will have to:

1. Click on the thumbnail - AND ....
2. THEN click on the VIEW FULL SIZE link.

On his main page:

http://community.webshots.com/user/abductboy

.. he tells us that he created the gallery on April 8, 2002 - that there are 9 pics, and that the latest edit was June 24, 2002.

But in order to go straight to "abductboy"´s Fake Moon Landing gallery, click on this link:

http://community.webshots.com/album/35183124ALDYVW

Yay, someone else who doesn't understand the first thing about optics, perspective, or lighting, yet crowns himself the most clever photo analyst ever.

In http://community.webshots.com/storag...6mBZRPJ_fs.jpg, he says at the bottom:

But you know that this a fake cause the astronaut pasted on the landscape. Here's proof, For this man, the Sun is behind his back. His visor showed the other man taking this picture. So the man in the visor facing our man, that's mean the Sun should be shining in his face, but the visor showed the Sun is behind him too!

I don't know what he's talking about. It doesn't look like John Young is behind the Sun. He's probably be confused about the zero-phase effect, since it looks it.

__________________
~AstroMike

Pathetic. Half the time I can't even tell what he's talking about.

In the Surveyor pics, he claims the distant LM is in the same position in both pics, when it's clearly not -- the displacement looks perfectly natural, given the roughly five degree difference in the angle of the Surveyor.

Funny, all those "identical backgrounds" look strikingly different to me.

Added:
I assume everyone got a good laugh about the second pic (the panorama, where he claims the converging shadows are proof that there was a spotlight). I'd love to see him try to reproduce that with miniatures and a photoflood.


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Donnie B. on 2002-06-26 22:03 ]</font>

Notice the amazing lack of understanding of basic perspective. Notice the really bad grammer. Notice the total abscence of research implicit in calling the lunar probe a "thingy".

I really have to wonder if this guy is trying to be funny or if this is another case of "Plane 9 From Outer Space" syndrome
(so bad you can't help but laugh)?


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Espritch on 2002-06-26 22:24 ]</font>

If you look at the pictures of him and his friends, "fellow paranormal investigators", you'll see that English is probably not his first language. That would explain the incomprehensible writing. If he's interested in the paranormal, all I can say is that chasing down every lens artifact will certainly keep him and his friends busy.

1. Apollo 12 and the "thingy". Let's chalk up the caption to poor English skills. However, the photographic argument is definitely poor spatial reasoning skills. In the left photo the angular distance between the Surveyor's solar mast and the LM is about 1.5 fiducials. In the photo on the right it is nearly 3 fiducials. The photographs are taken three or four steps apart, which would make little difference in the line of sight to the LM, but a drastic difference in the line of sight to the Surveyor.

2. Assembled Apollo 12 panorama. The strange "spotlight" on the right is backscatter at zero phase. He claims the sun is supposed to light the surface evenly, which would only be true for a perfectly flat surface. If this scene were lit by an artificial light, the shadows would not converge since the lighting angles at each point would closely follow the line of sight at each point. But they do converge, indicating parallel lighting and projective imaging.

3. Views through the MESA. The author isn't specific about what makes the shot impossible, so we don't know if this is the "shifting background" argument (explained by differences in the azimuth of the optical axis which are not always apparent from the orientation of foreground objects), or a parallax argument dealing with the apparent height of the background mountains.

4. Apollo 5 salutes. Apparently he falls into the classic trap of assuming the background is very close. As John Witts has demonstrated, these photos actually line up quite nicely when registered.

5. Shadow direction. The author can't tell shade from shadow. When examining the visor reflection he seems to mistake the reflection of the shadow for the photographer.

6. Apollo 16 backgrounds. The top photo is taken facing south while the bottom photo is taken facing northeast. That would explain the different backgrounds.

7. Apollo 17 changing background size. One of the proof photos is a 500 mm lens shot, so it's not a good comparison to the ones taken with the 38 mm lens. Again, it's parallax. If you lower your camera from five feet off the ground to one foot off the ground without changing the tilt, you'll get the same background as before, provided no object now intervenes and blocks your view.

8. Identical backgrounds. For some strange reason this author shows us a whole series of obviously different backgrounds and claims they're the same. I can pick out the Sculptured Hills, the foothills of the South Massif, and Bear Mountain.

9. Fake shadow. The author simply assumes the equipment held by the astronaut is resting on the ground. It isn't; he's holding it up in the air(lessness) and the shadow falls on the ground behind it.

Basically all the same old errors of optics, perspective, and lighting. The only good thing that can be said is that he seems to have copied few if any of these photos from the standard hoax literature. It appears to be original work. Not very good work, but at least he's thinking for himself.

This stuff looks like Jack White knock-offs to me

Jay, please.

"Thingy" is a perfectly good technical term for any item that is more than a "doohickey" but not quite a "whatchmacallit." I use these terms with my auto mechanic all the time and he knows exactly what I mean.

__________________
Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.
Isaac Asimov

Jay, (or anyone else who might know for that matter)

Reading your posts has been most educational and entertianing but I have to admit there are parts that leave me dumbfounded. I have absolutely NO knowledge or experience with photography and your explanations of the science of photography in general and photogrammatic interpretation in specific leave me baffled. Might you be able to suggest a web page or reference work from which I might gain a rudimentary understanding of the subjects. Search engine queries lead to an embarrasment of riches ("introductory photography" yields 55K+ web page hits on yahoo) and I have no idea where to start. What actually triggered this was your discussion of Fiducials. What are they?
Thanks in advance.

Hi Waarthog !

This is a fiducial ("crosshair"):



I strongly recommend the photography section from Jay´s website:

http://www.clavius.org

The photography section is at:

http://www.clavius.org/photoidx.html

... and here is the sub-section on crosshairs:

http://www.clavius.org/photoret.html

From http://www.clavius.org/photoret.html:

"The lunar surface cameras were fitted with a device called a reseau plate on which were etched these small black crosshairs. The plate was pressed against the film so that any image exposed on the film would contain a grid of these marks, called "fiducials"."

This stuff looks like Jack White knock-offs to me

That's what I thought at first, but I can't find where any other person, including White, has made these specific arguments using these specific photos. He's making the same typical mistakes as other would-be analysts, but you can usually tell when someone has just redacted one of the major authors.

"Thingy" is a perfectly good technical term

I'm an engineer. 90% of what I do revolves around thingies, doo-dads, whats-its, and doo-hickies. The biggest problem engineers face is coming up with cool-sounding names for things. In an assembly of 200 components, not everything can be a doo-dad. And so we have names like "trunnion" (which sounds like something you'd be hit with in dark alley) and "gimbal" which are both just fancy names for thing-a-ma-bobs which allow pivoting.

What actually triggered this was your discussion of Fiducials. What are they?

Hm, it seems everyone else has already given you links to what I've written. See also

http://www.clavius.org/photlens.html

The fiducials are those little crosshairs that appear in the photos taken on the lunar surface. They allow you to correct any distortion that would be caused by duplication, and then to provide a fixed frame of reference to the camera for photogrammetry. And we use them informally as a sort of coordinate system for locating objects in the photos.

If you know something about the lens and the camera, you can equate the fiducial marks with angular distances. That is, you know that the distance between two fiducials in the photo equates to an angular separation of so many degrees. This provides a basis for some photogrammetric computations without the need for stereo pairs.

In photo analysis it's important to remember that you have affine space, which are the geometric rules that hold for a volume of space as we know it exists, and projective space which is the geometric basis for viewing a volume of space from one point (e.g., vision or photography).

Perspective is one aspect of the transformation through the camera lens from affine space to projective space. Parallax is another. The mathematics of these effects are well understood, but not generally helpful to convey understanding to the layman. It's best to try to understand it qualitatively, as in

http://www.clavius.org/perspshdw.html

I hope this gets you going down the right path.

Indeed it does. Thanks Jay and Solar Flare! This is a good start.