Hiya gang !

Thought that you´d like to see Neil Haggath´s brand new (December 2004) moon hoax debunking website:

http://www.spaceandsanity.com
(Domain registered as late as December 13, 2004)

He is dealing with the Moon Hoax here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/neil.ha..._Contents.html
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/neil.ha...lo_Page_1.html
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/neil.ha...lo_Page_2.html
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/neil.ha...lo_Page_3.html
(Page 3 is dealing with the infamous Nathan Jones)
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/neil.ha...lo_Page_4.html
(Page 4 is dealing with Bart Sibrel)
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/neil.ha...lo_Page_5.html
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/neil.ha...lo_Page_6.html
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/neil.ha...lo_Page_7.html

Neil writes about himself here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/neil.haggath/Author.html

"I graduated from the University of Leeds, England, in 1983, with an honours degree in Physics with Astrophysics. Though much of this site will deal with astronomy- and space-related subjects, I’m not a professional astronomer; I’m a software engineer by profession.

(...................................)

I’ve been an amateur astronomer since as early an age as I can remember. I’ve been a member of Cleveland and Darlington Astronomical Society since 1981, and its Secretary since 1989. I’ve organised five major astronomical conventions, and frequently give talks to astronomical societies around the UK. I’m very proud to be a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, having been elected to that honour in 1993."

And Mr. Haggath has a really cool pic of himself standing next to an engine nozzle !

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/neil.ha...ollo_Fig_2.jpg

What a well-done site. Some folks on Usenet asked me to write up a standard response to Nathan Jones; I'm glad I don't have to now.

And the F-1 photo is awesome. It's really hard to get an idea for how large that engine really is unless you're standing next to it.

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Jay, page 3 of the links says you had a debate with Jones, was that here or on Apollohoax.com?

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It was on Usenet in one of the astronomy newsgroups. It's technically an ongoing debate, although he ducks out for sometimes several months at a time, then tries to start over again forgetting where we left off. I'm told by some that "Nathan Jones" is one of the many names under which the notorious Daniel Joseph Min posts, but I'm disinclined to believe that.

Jones did try to change his document to account for some of the things I had said, but he's no more technically adept than any other conspiracy theorist. His tactic of debunking some of the more common, sillier charges such as flags waving, and of hedging on some of the others like dust plumes from the LRV wheels, is probably more a rhetorical tactic to prevent his being summarily dismissed. When you challenge him, he becomes decidedly unreasonable.

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

Now where have I seen that before? That must be a required trait?

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It is, but many conspiracists start out unreasonable. Jones tries the same approach as Bennett and Percy: slaughtering a sacrificial lamb or two to suggest to the reader that not all the moon hoax arguments are sound, and that they'd be willing to back down if sufficient evidence were shown. But as soon as you try to take them at their word, they become typically dogmatic.

Jones, for example, thinks the rocket plume photos I use in my example are misleading because the plume from the hypergolic fuel is so greatly expanded. He suggests that a narrower nozzle be used in order to confine the plume to a column. Well, first he doesn't understand that this is normal plume behavior in a vacuum, and second he doesn't understand that narrowing the nozzle will cause the plume to expand more. He could easily have backed down from that error without a great loss of credibility, but he stuck to his guns.

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

I know the feeling. I drive by the Saturn V that sits on JSC at least twice a day. You don't realize how big it is until you walk around it.

I have some notes on Neil Haggath's discussion of video that he has on his "5. Other Conspiracy Arguments" page:

The poor, fuzzy, black and white TV pictures applied only to Apollo 11; on all the subsequent missions, the coverage was in colour, and of considerably better quality.

The image quality on Apollo 14 was quite poor too--and they used the high-gain antenna. The quality improved markedly with Apollo 15.

The LM, however, had only a small low-gain antenna, about 40 cm across; note its size in Fig. 4 ( in Section 2.1 ). This was capable of transmitting a low-grade black and white TV signal, but useless for colour.

The antenna on the LM was able to send a usable color signal. Apollos 12, 14, and 15 used the LM antenna for the initial climb-down-the-ladder sequences because the high-gain antenna or later, the rover, was not setup yet. The TV picture is just a little noisier (more "snow"), but definitely usable. In fact, I think it would have been suitable for the entire Apollo 11 EVA.

In fact, at the time of Apollo 11, the equipment needed to send colour TV on the later missions was still under development.

That is the main reason why Apollo 11 did not have a color TV camera: None were available! Apollo 12 had to use the color camera carried in the Command Module on Apollo 10. It had to be modified to function in the lunar environment, but it was not ready for Apollo 11.

The LM’s small low-gain antenna was not even capable of transmitting a black and white TV signal in standard television format; in order to use this antenna, the signal had to be “compressed”, by reducing the number of lines in the image and the number of frames per second. This reduced the required data transmission rate to only 5% of that required for colour TV. Naturally, it also degraded the quality of the TV pictures; this is another reason for the “fuzzy and grainy” appearance of the Apollo 11 footage.

There are a variety of reasons the TV quality improved over the missions. One key improvement was in the development of better filters in ground station equipment. The LM had to simultaneously transmit TV, telemetry, and voice signals. The three signals had to share limited spectrum space, a little more than 1.25 MHz wide. The lower 500 KHz was allocated to the TV signal, and the telemetry and voice signals were assigned to 1.024 MHz and 1.25 MHz respectively.

The video signal that the black-and-white camera produced could fit (mostly) into the 500 KHz space. The video signal from the color cameras could not. It required much more bandwidth--so much so that it spilled over and beyond the telemetry and voice signals. This created a dilemma for the engineers: If they allowed the telemetry and voice to remain mixed in with the video, there would be annoying interference patterns in the TV picture. On the other hand, if they filtered out the telemetry and voice signals, the crudeness of the available filters would filter out much of the fine detail in the TV picture. (The fine details in a video image--those details that make the image look sharp--require high bandwidth.)

Prior to Apollo 16, the only filters they had available were low-pass filters that, if ideal, would pass through any signal below 1 MHz and block any signal above it. Ideally, they wanted a sharp boundary between the signals that were passed and those that were blocked. In practice, the filters "rolled-off", which meant that the filters blocked more of the video signal below 1 MHz than was desirable. As a result, the TV picture quality was somewhat fuzzy.

Even for Apollo 11, with its lower bandwidth video signal, they had to filter out the telemetry and voice signals. The amplitude of the video signal transmitted from Apollo 11 was larger than expected. Since the TV signal was frequency-modulated (FM), this meant the signal "swung" higher above 500 KHz than it should have. This caused the low-pass filters at the Goldstone tracking station to clip the signal. The TV signal encoded the image information such that the darker the image feature, the greater the amplitude of the signal. What the Goldstone filters clipped, then, were the shadow details. You will notice that for the first few minutes as Neil Armstrong is climbing down the ladder that his space suit is almost fully lost in shadow.

The Honeysuckle Creek ground station had newer wide-band filters in place that were able to accommodate the "loud" video signal coming from Apollo 11. Houston switched to the better Honeysuckle Creek signal before Neil stepped onto the surface. You can easily spot the switch because, for one thing, Neil's suit brightens considerably.

The filter situation did not change over the next few missions. Although in color, the video quality of Apollo 14 was notably soft. The quality also suffered because of over-exposure problems that caused the image to bloom.

Apollo 15 introduce a new color camera that used a different type of image sensor that was higher resolution and was better able to handle wide variations in light intensity. Engineers also made a concerted effort to reduce the degradation of the signal as it travelled to Houston from the ground stations. They also went to the trouble of building a 20 x 40 foot simulation of the lunar landscape to adjust the camera to the high scene contrasts they were encountering.

For Apollo 16, Goldstone engineer Bill Wood developed a filter that exactly cancelled out the telemetry and voice signals with minimal degradation to the video signal. This provided the best image quality to date because the finer scene details were no longer filtered out. Around this time NASA also had the video signals routed to Los Angeles where a company, Image Transform, processed them to reduce the noise.

(Edit: Change 500 MHz to 500 KHz!)

I had a quick look through that site. It's rather good. I did e-mail him a couple of points though:

1: He states that Apollo 9 carried the first LM. Apollo 9 carried the first manned LM, but Apollo 5 was the first flight of the LM in space. Am I right in saying that various problems that showed up on this test flight, and the delays incurred in fixing them, were what led to the LM being unavailable for Apollo 8, and so in part for the decision to send Apollo 8 into lunar orbit rather than repeat Apollo 7 with an Earth orbit CSM only mission?

2: He did not seem to be aware that Sibrel's 'smoking gun' Apollo 11 footage is not as exclusive as Sibrel claims. I set him right by pointing out that he could get that footage and every other bit of footage from Apollo 11 from Spacecraft Films for about the same price as Sibrel's garbage.

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