While browsing my local (West Australia) sunday paper, the "Sunday Times" (Page 53) I noticed the following letter:

(Italics Mine)

Not sure if I have done the right thing in quoting the whole letter but I thought the group needed to see this.

In any case what more can I say than I feel sorry for the writer, even if NASA landed on the 'Bright Side' of the Moon, he would be unable to see anything even with a highpowered telescope.

After seeing this myself my determination is redoubled to do whatever I can to fight the lies of people like Kaysing and Siebrel.

Other comments eagerly awaited

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We all know those Venusians: Doing their hair in shock waves, smoking electrical coronas, wearing Van Allen belts and resting their tiny elbows on a Geiger counter...

John Sladek, The New Apocrypha, pg 34.

Write a letter to the paper correcting the misconception! That's what I'd do if I were you. It's a golden opportunity to spread knowledge and fight nonsense!

What I don't get: if he's interested in spaceflight and moon landings, I suppose he'd have looked up to the moon once and tried to locate the places (not the vehicles ) where they landed? I mean I can see it with great precision using only binocs. Of course if he always was convinced they landed on the other side of the moon in the 60's-70's, he has reason for never having looked at it before. but then again, he doesn't seem to know that the "dark side" is called like that because it is turned AWAY from the earth?

Thinking you could see them with your own ground equipment too, is rather "strange".

I remember thinking that I might be able to hear the Shuttle flying overhead, with those large engines and stuff. Not seeing it with my naked eyes of course, it was way too far away for that. I was 6 at that time and only started to be interested at a later age, learning the opposite was more true

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To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

Of course, there is no "dark side" of the moon. One side is always facing away from the Earth, but it still gets about two weeks of sunlight per revolution.

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"It's time to receive our missions from The Head."

I did not interpret the letter as the man wanting a shadowpart of the moon for the landings. I think he was just referring to a side of the moon, and it seems he thought the "dark side" was the side facing us #-o

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To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

He said "Could they not land on the dark side this time?" so I think he was using "dark side" to mean "far side," as most people use it. He wants them to land on the near side this time.

Oh in English you need to interpret that sentence like that?

I thought it was the same construction like "wouldn't it be possible to..."
which in fact asks "is it possible to"

But now that I reread the letter, indeed he seems to ask not to land on the dark side (meaning far side) this time. Has he never seen photos indicating the landing spots, which show a rather familiar side of the moon? What about the pictures from the surface of the moon showing earth?

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To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

Thought about that, but I have no guarantee that they would print it and in any case the 'Sunday Times' is owned by R Murdoch (yes, that one).

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We all know those Venusians: Doing their hair in shock waves, smoking electrical coronas, wearing Van Allen belts and resting their tiny elbows on a Geiger counter...

John Sladek, The New Apocrypha, pg 34.

Your chances are better than you might think. Newspapers are seemingly always willing to print letters from people who are just spouting off, but a response from someone who actually sounds like they know what they're talking about is also likely to get printed. That's been my personal experience. Give it a try.

What have you got to lose, though? They might print it. Newspapers like controversy! Whenever I read the letters page in a newspaper, it seems like half the letters they print are contradicting earlier letters! (Kind of like a very slow, disjointed BB . . . )

It can mean that, but it would sound old-fashioned and a little stuffy. Grammatically, it's a question of whether not is modifying could or land. These days, it's probably more likely to be the latter. The analogue is "Would it be possible not to . . . " rather than "Would it not be possible to . . . ".

Thanks for the info Tomba. So how come does anyone think they landed on the far side last time, AND that we would be able to see them with home equipment (make that even any equipment )?

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To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

I don't mean to be disparaging, but I think the general public's concept of the distance to the Moon is along the lines of this.

You can hardly blame them. Everyone's seen pictures like this and diagrams like this. And after all, the Moon looks very close in the sky.

Perhaps when the landings were happening some news reports may have mentioned the real reason no one could see them from Earth, but it's been long enough for people to have forgotten those reasons and replaced them with an explanation that fits their concept of the Earth-Moon system better.

Yeah, indeed, you can see craters with the naked eye! Sure you can see the rocket (...) with a telescope! In primary school, we once tried to draw a solar system on the football terrain, using balls. We couldn't get many things on it without having to use a grain for the earth , but it gave a nice feeling about the scale of everything. At 10km height, you can hardly see a house standing. Now how about an equally sized moon lander at 350.000 km... It wouldn't hurt to give some general education on the scale of things. To let people know just how incredibly big that crater is they can see with the naked eye, and how small the lander is compared to that.

I Loved the song

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To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

Wouldn't it be more technically accurate to call the far side the light side anyway? I mean the near side is occasionally eclipsed by the earth, reducing the amount of light over time that it receives compared to the far side, correct?

But then the near side is lit up a little by earthshine, whereas the far side isn't.

I'm guessing that the near side is brighter, by a smidge.

(forgive the use of jargon)

ISn't the near side brighter in surface color? Not that they knew that when they started calling the dark side "the dark side" I guess.

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To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

I think your right --- fewer maria on that side. I forget if this is by chance, or if somehow the orientation toward earth matters.

It's also true that the average solar flux is greater on the far side than the near side since the near side is (on average) farther from the sun by about one Moon-Earth distance.

Of course, now we're splitting hairs off of the millionth angel on the head of a pin...

No, it's darker. The near side has the maria, or the upwelling of the darker basalts. The far side is more or less uniformly the same anorthositic material as the near-side highlands. So the "dark" side faces Earth.

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

... and more surface area is maria on the western side of the Moon than the eastern side. The first quarter Moon is brighter than the last quarter! So really, it's the "dark quadrant".

Not sure if there's a good comparison photo on the site. I google this:

http://www.mhhe.com/physsci/astronom...er9/09f19.html

Luke..... I am your Father.



*Oh come on, with all this Dark Side and Light Side guff, I had to do it. :P

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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

I had trouble parsing that sentence, too. I got the impression they wanted to land on the dark part so we could see the blast from the rocket or something. But after reflection, it does sound like they think Apollo landed on the far side, and that's why we couldn't see it with telescopes.

Could one reason for that misconception come from statements in the press packages about thruster burns occurring on the far side of the moon, such as the burns to establish lunar orbit and the return?

W.F. Tomba, you are correct that most people have an inadequate concept of the distances/ratios involved in the Solar System in general and the Moon's relation to Earth. To give a quick demonstration with handy items at the approximate scale,

Moon = regular tennis ball, D=2.5 inches (6.35 cm)
Earth = regular basketball (size 7), D~= 9.5 inches (24.13 cm)

The ratio is close, with the Earth just a tad large (M/E = 0.273, T/B ~= 0.263)

The Moon is about 30 Earth diameters from the Earth, or at that scale, 285 inches (724 cm) = 23.75 feet

Maybe you can see now why all drawings and sketches are non-scale representations.

Well, if the Expanding Earth people are right, all you have to do is go back a few millennia and your model will be perfect! :wink:

Or you could go with an underinflated Earth. Just make sure you use a ball that's had a lot of use on a concrete court, otherwise your terrain will be much too rough! 8)

Just a reminder: the word dark in "dark side of the moon" means mysterious, secret, obscure, hidden -- as in the idiom "being kept in the dark", as in the phrase "darkest Africa". It has nothing to do with photon intensity received or reflected.

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I've recently noticed that very few people ever look up at the night sky, even with just the naked eye. I first came to this realization after leaving the movie "Hellboy" and mentioning that the moon during the eclipse looked nothing like our moon from Earth (it looked like Mercury, cratered and no 'seas'). I was baffled that no one else I was with noticed this. I spent hours trying to figure this out from the point of view of the FX guys, since I figured high detail images of the real moon would be just as easy to get as to render your own version.

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::Evil Bomber
"Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things."
--Robert A. Heinlein

I've also found that a great number of people are just plain ignorant about basic astronomical facts. I had a friend who, though perfectly intelligent in most ways and who was also owned her own business, had no idea that the stars were actually outside the solar system. When I tried to explain to her just how much outside they actually were, it just boggled her mind. I've also found that not everybody realizes that only one side of the moon faces the earth. A lot has to do with the fact that most people get by just fine without knowing those kinds of things, and never bother to consider them.

A lot could be just the quality of education, or the culture the people have come from. From my own experience when I was in junior high & high school there was always an undercurrent of hostility towards knowledge, even among the "gifted" (read "wealthy") students in the advanced classes. If you failed or nearly failed an assignment or test, you would likely be congratulated by your peers, and if you did well you would be accused of “ruining the curve.” When you’re exposed to a learning environment like that, it’s not surprising that you might not pick up on things like the distance to the moon, and as an adult be much more easily swayed by stories of hoaxed moon landings.

I went to school in the south, which is not known for its educational excellence, so I’m not sure it’s quite as bad in other parts of the U.S. It was in a rather large and cosmopolitan city, though one that had gotten big very recently and very quickly. I remembered reading part of the city's history that even as late as the 1930’s and 40’s, when it was just a small mill town, the mill owners were very opposed to public education in general, because they feared an educated work force that might demand things like unions or just quit and try to find better jobs. So I guess the remnants of the kind of anti-intellectual attitudes that were encouraged in the population by the elites of a few generations back remain in the culture. Oh, and don’t get me started about the watered down biology that the poor teachers were forced to teach.

I see the popularity of the moon hoax conspiracy, as well as that of other outlandish conspiracy theories, creationism, etc., as being a cultural problem, rather than merely an educational one. It’s not enough to try and educated people if there are so many people who resist being educated.

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My first space mission!

hey! the two are NOT the same thing!

okay, now that I've gotten that out of my system, allow me to quote James Garner in Support Your Local Sheriff--or paraphrase him, anyway. these people just make me feel tired all over. I mean, heck, there's an Encyclopedia Brown mystery that makes use of how vast the relative distances are!

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Yeah, I know, I was just being a bit flippant and sarcasm is hard to get across in text. Also I put gifted in quotes because I didn't really mean it literally. "Academically Gifted" was a label they applied to students who did well on the standardized tests, but it certainly didn't necessarily mean you were truly gifted. There definately was a very strong correlation between how much money your parents had and what classes you took. There were plenty of exceptions, myself included, but in general it was true. I think it was especially pronounced in my particular high school, as it was situated in a very "old money" neighborhood, but by law they bussed in 50% of their students from the low income neighborhoods across town. It was sort of a microcosm of societal inequality, with the predominantly minority, lower income population in the "regular" classes often held in temporary trailer classrooms and the predominantly (and very near exclusively) white population in the "advanced" classes held in the nicer brick and morter classrooms. Segregation as alive and well, but it just took a much more subtle form. Actually I think recently the city repealed its busing laws, so if anything it's gotten worse over the years.

But, like I said, I saw plenty of exceptions to the rule and I know plenty of people who worked hard to break down the social and cultural barriers. Generalizations are usually not very productive, and I apologize if I generalized too much.

Now I'm way OT. Where were we? Oh yes, moon hoax theories. Yup, we went to the moon.

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My first space mission!