It is my understanding that one can actually see at least one American flag on the Moon. If this information is accurate (alas, I have no telescope) then how might this flag have been delivered to the Moon and deployed if no human ever went there?

I highly doubt that we can see a little American flag on the moon. If we cannot even see the landing sites themselves, how could we see an American flag?

Assuming that we could, considering that the Moon has no atmosphere to help deploy the flag, I wonder how that would happen, too.

You can only see the flag if you go to the moon in person.

No telescope on the earth has enough resolving power to see the flags on the moon. Even the Hubble telescope can't do that.

And probably not then either. I suspect the strong ultr-violet radiation and the high and low temperature extremes have demolished it long since.

Here is my answer to people who email me about using a 'scope to view the Apollo artifacts:

It won't work. The problem is resolution. There is an upper limit to how well a telescope can see objects depending on their size. Even for Hubble, at the distance of the Moon it cannot clearly see objects less than about 100 meters across. Nothing we left
on the Moon is anywhere near that big, so all you would see is a collection of dots, which would prove nothing!

There is a way, though: wait for the local sunrise or sunset at the landing site. That way, the lunar module would cast a long
shadow, possibly long enough to see. That wouldn't prove anything, but it lends support. Still, I doubt Hubble will ever do this. Time on Hubble is hotly fought over (see
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/badhst.html) and I don't see the people running the 'scope letting someone use up precious
time to prove that we went to the Moon, when no scientist seriously doubts it in the first place! It might be possible to do this from the ground, though. I would need to think about it and figure out if the shadow is really visible or not. It's a neat idea.

There are already a couple of photos of lander shadows. They've been posted here before. But they were taken from command modules orbiting the moon during the Apollo missions.

There's also the Clementine image of the ground disturbances of the Apollo 15 landing site. (Note, the link doesn't mention it, but I believe it is NOT a visible light photo.)

http://www.tass-survey.org/richmond/...ar_lander.html

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...And that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be banana-shaped. --Sir Bedevere

That's the most depressing thing I've read all day... I guess I sort of had the illusion in my mind that the entire site would be preserved intact (until some meteorite -- or luneorite -- or whatever -- smacked into it, which certainly has to happen sooner or later...)

Silas

I was hoping about reflective laser scans of the moon surface, but if there's nothing left...

I expect the metal parts are still there. And maybe some cloth. But it surely won't look like the US flag. Ultra violet fades colors fairly rapidly, even filtered through the atmosphere of the earth.

Blue seems to be particularly hard to "fix" to cloth so it won't fade. And I think that red isn't all that much better.

Nothing lasts forever.

Thanks very much for the replies to my original message! The idea about reflective laser scans is particularly interesting, but I would imagine that such scans would be subject to the same conspiracy theories as the landing itself. That is, the government or some major university would have to perform the scan...

Do you mean sweeping a laser across the moon to try and get a topographic map that would show a lander? If so, I don't think a laser would provide that kind of detail. Check out the following site about measuring the distance to the moon using a laser.

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/expmoon/Apol...ents_LRRR.html

Particulary this paragraph.

"Laser beams are used because they remain tightly focused for large distances. Nevertheless, there is enough dispersion of the beam that it is about 7 kilometers in diameter when it reaches the Moon and 20 kilometers in diameter when it returns to Earth. Because of this very weak signal, observations are made for several hours at a time. By averaging the signal for this period, the distance to the Moon can be measured to an accuracy of about 3 centimeters (the average distance from the Earth to the Moon is about 385,000 kilometers)."

There is also a neat pic of the laser at the top of the page.

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"We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." - James D. Nicoll

You must be new to this area of debate, and I envy your innocence. Those of us who have fought this battle for ages can all attest to the fact that the hoax believers will never accept any contrary evidence, no matter how authoritative it may be. Their minds are made up, and cannot be changed. There are some absolutes in this universe, and the pig-headed intransigence of hoax believers is one of them.

But you've taken a good first step in your path to enlightenment by coming to one of the best possible boards with which to fight these lying fools. Welcome.

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Bailey’s second law; There is no relationship between the three virtues of intelligence, education, and wisdom.

There's also the Clementine image of the ground disturbances of the Apollo 15 landing site. (Note, the link doesn't mention it, but I believe it is NOT a visible light photo.)

This photo was brought to public attention by an article on Space.com. The researchers cited in that article have confirmed that the photo is not a visible light photo, but is a "phase angle" image. This is produced by applying digital image processing techiques to a series of photographs in different wavelengths taken of the same area of the lunar surface.

Other photographs and astronaut testimony agree that the DPS-disturbed lunar regolith is lighter than the surrounding area to the naked eye.

Hey peeps, just browsing (nothing to do right now), thought Id add my 5 cents.

if you want to view small stuff on the moon, send a satellite into orbit, and take a few pics. of course they'll have to be spy satellite quality if you'd do it today.

hubble has a resolution of 270 ft per pixel when photographing the moon.

but hey, get a spy satellite and send it into lunar orbit, with 1cm resolution you'd even see the flagpole [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_wink.gif[/img]

so aim for the apollo 11 landing site, the knocked their flag down...

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it came to me, my own, my precious

The resolving power of the HST has been discussed. Another limit of the HST is its stabilization system. A very ingeneous system keeps the spacecraft aimed in the same direction to within a very small fraction of a degree during the exposure. Unfortunately this is unsuitable for photographing the moon which, in HST's estimation, is right in front of its face. The HST is moving along its orbit at 17,000 mph and this motion blurs the image. What is needed is a system more like that used on KH spy satellites which rotates the spacecraft ever so slightly during the exposure. The HST has taken a few photographs of the moon, but nothing that compares to the photos taken in orbit by Apollo command module pilots.

The analogy is to a passenger in a moving vehicle. Distant objects appear fixed. He does not have to move his head to see them. But to continue looking at objects just off the roadway, he must turn his head as the car passes them.

I own a flag made by the same company which supplied the flags (via a retail outlet) to NASA for deployment on the moon. They're not hard to come by. But they are, however, quite sensitive to sunlight. The colors fade, and the material itself -- nylon fabric -- undergoes a chemical breakdown. If you use nylon or Dacron sails on your boat, the manufacturer will sternly warn you to keep the sails inside their covers when not set.

The pig-headedness of the conspiracy theorists is, of course, legendary. But on this particular point there is some confusion among other people. I have heard it said on a number of occasions that the visibility from earth of Apollo remnants has proven the success of the missions.

Um, Rat. I think that was his point. He's saying the evidence would not be believed specifically because it would have to come from an 'authority' (in this case the guvment or the "intellectual elite"

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Carl Matherly

Offical Battlestar Galactica Apologist

Named Time Magazine's 2006 "Person of the Year"

Both points are probably valid. The conspiracists categorically reject anything coming from a government source, or from anything receiving government funding, and in extreme cases anyone with professional or academic credentials that qualifies them to comment intelligently on the hoax theory. This pretty much eliminates any potential source of contrary evidence.

If the conspiracists are true to form they'll respond to the eventual discovery of Apollo remnants in one or both of two ways: categorical dismissal of the discovery based on alleged bias, or extension of the hypothesis to account for the discovery.

The former is easy to accomplish because it is hard to examine the lunar surface in sufficient detail without the intervention of agencies likely to arouse the conspiracist's suspicion.

The latter is easy to accomplish because the entire hoax theory case is based on nothing but conjecture. If someone discovers Apollo remnants on the lunar surface, they can simply claim that NASA used unmanned rockets to place the debris there shortly before the "discovery". They've already postulated a series of highly improbable occurrences. Why stop there?

The contention that the conspiracists always find some way to get around contrary evidence without dealing with it is still quite valid. The categorical rejection of government sources is just a common technique to accomplish that. If the conspiracists remain true to form, I'd expect them to do whatever it takes to justify their conclusion in their own minds.


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: JayUtah on 2002-01-10 11:22 ]</font>

What's fun is that there are conspiracists who think that the Moon landings were a hoax, and there are other conspiracists who think we already have military bases on Mars. I'd like to lock some of each in a room together to see what happens!

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

We already have the Bill Kaysing crowd (those who believe Apollo did not land on the moon) versus the Richard Hoagland crowd (those who believe the Apollo landings succeeded, but found artificial constructs there and covered it up). Check out http://www.lunaranomalies.com/, the site run by Hoagland's gang that debunks the Kaysing-esque theorists.

What's amazing is that Hoagland's researchers are amazingly resourceful. Steve Troy found conclusive proof of the origin of the infamous "C" rock. He actually found the print with the hair fiber contamination on it. And their discussion of the radiation issue is the most thorough I've seen published on the net. These people are tenacious and quite good at undermining the conclusions of Kaysing, David Percy, Ralph Rene, and other "we never went" enthusiasts.

But it's so disappointing to seem them go off the deep end and engage in speculative correlations a la Piper a.k.a. Seethruart. Troy says he sees Roman arches and other precise geometries in the orbital photographs of the moon's surface. And of course they stubbornly insist that the lens flares occasionally seen on EVA photographs are really reflections of large crystal or glass structures.

It's okay with me if people want to believe the moon was once inhabited by intelligent creatures who built wonderful things. But it's baffling to see someone with a vast array of resources at his command and an excellent grasp of reason and argumentation to make such an off-the-wall assertion based on such blatantly flimsy evidence.

You never can tell about some people.

I particularly like their insistence that NASA times everything according to the positions of certain stars over certain locations, never realizing that with all the stars, positions, and locations they consider significant, it's a virtual certainty that something is going to line up.

Right, that's what's sometimes called the "confirmation bias". That is, if you're predisposed to believe that something significant exists in what you're studying, you'll keep looking (and frequently lowering your standards) until you find it.

There's a big difference in investigations that try to see if something exists, and investigations that try to confirm the existence of something already believed to exist. In the former, coming up empty means that the thing you're looking for doesn't exist. In the latter, coming up empty means you're not trying hard enough.

The sad thing is that I try to have an open mind. I believe it's quite possible that there's life out there, and probably intelligent life too. But just because I reject the poorly-conceived arguments that earth has been visited by these space aliens, I get labelled a "closed-minded skeptic". It's hard to convince people that there's no advantage in being so "open-minded" that your brain falls out.