I know it gets tiresome but I am getting questions from a hoax believer about the lack of stars in the Moon pics. How different would the star field be and how difficult would it have been to calculate what it would be. My suggestion is that a simple planitarium projector could have been programmed to give a star field if they had wanted to hoax it. The HB take on it is that figuring out what it would look like was too difficult so they left it out.

It is a popular misconception that the star field would appear different from the moon -- that is, the stars would be in different positions relative to each other.

The parallax involved in the distance from the earth to the moon is utterly negligible. The relative positions of the stars would be unchanged down to the level of observable precision -- several decimal places of degrees.

In 1969 the positions of several thousand stars were accurately known. Not only would planetarium instruments have been able to recreate the star field as seen from the moon, the astronauts trained in planetariums to recognize the star patterns they would use for navigation.

Further, any competent photographer can tell you why the stars should not be visible in the photographs. The argument that NASA couldn't compute the "revised" star locations accurately enough to fool astronomers is a red herring. Let's assume NASA had been able to generate correct star positions and thus included them in the photos. Every photographer on earth would have cried "foul!".

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

Do the maths. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img]

The Moon is about 380,000 kilometres from the Earth.

The *nearest* star (apart from the Sun) is over 40,000,000,000,000 kilometres from Earth. That means that when the Moon is between the Earth and that star, it's only 39,999,999,620,000 kilometres from that star.

As you can see, the difference is negligible. (And that's the star that's only 4.5 light years from Earth, let alone the others that are hundreds or thousands of light years away.)

O boy
The Earth, in its orbit around the Sun, moves that far in about four hours. If the stars changed much at all, you could watch it happen in an evening, in your front yard.

You can do the starfield from the Moon with paper and pencil, especially the stars around the famous Apollo-16 UV image of Earth.

For stars near Earth, get an ephemerus with lunar positions in RA/DEC, for the times of interest, and just 'invert' the line-of-sight on the celestial sphere. Look on a star chart.

For the sky in general, it takes a few more fudge factors but you could sketch out a transformation of an Earth-based starfield at the same 'solar time' -- how long 'post sunrise' in terms of degrees (15 deg per hour on Earth, a half a degree per hour on the moon), with a corrective 23 deg tilt for Earth's axis.

Thanks people, my reply had been that the Moon put the astronauts one light sec (+/-) closer or further away from any star all of which were tens or hundreds or thousands of light years away and that the difference in angle (I had forgotten the term parallax) would be infintesimal.

Glad to know I was correct. My expertise(such as it is)is electronics, not astronomy.

I wrote computer code to do this in college, but I don't think I could remember how to actually do it now without looking up some stuff in books. Ironically it was a class assignment, so it can't be that monumentally difficult. The point is that the star field is identical whether it's viewed from the earth or from the moon or even from Mars. You just have to resolve which portion of it you're looking at, and that's been possible for even hobby astronomers for years.

A theory attributed to Bill Kaysing says that the relative positions of the stars would change due to parallax if seen from the moon, and that expert astronomers would be able to tell if there were any discrepancies. I don't know if that's his actual theory or if it's been made even more ignorant in the retelling. Either way the facts are clear:

1. The star field is unchanged according to a great degree of precision when viewed from anywhere in the solar system.

2. The portion of the star field that would be visible from a point on the moon at any date and time is not difficult to compute via spherical trigonometry.

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

Isn't the change in position just = arctan(Earth-Moon distance/Earth - Alpha Centauri distance*)

I know Alpha Centauri is off at an angle, so the change in position is smaller but I digress:

4.5 x 10^5 km/4.3 x 10^13km = 1 x 10^-8

So, whatever arctan(10^-8) is is the apparent difference in a star at 4.3 light years away... so 5.73e-7 degrees or .002 arcseconds.

Certainly measurable, but hardly noticeable.

(Am I doing this right?)






<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Rodina on 2003-01-14 16:02 ]</font>

Could Venus have shown in any of the Lunar surface photos?

It's now 10:07am and I was looking at Venus about 20 minutes ago, high in our northern sky, where it is easy to see with the naked eye. This means it can be photographed with an exposure suitable for sunlight.

I've found figures for it as follows --
Apollo 11: Mag -4.1 43 degrees west of Sun
Apollo 12: Mag -3.9 16 degrees west of Sun
Apollo 14: Mag -4.3 46 degrees west of Sun
Apollo 15: Mag -3.9 7 degrees west of Sun
Apollo 16: Mag -4.4 45 degrees east of Sun
Apollo 17: Mag -4.0 28 degrees west of Sun

Haven't worked out yet whether these mean it was visible from the landing sites.

Has anyone done any research on this?


[Fixed typo.]

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Kiwi on 2003-01-14 16:03 ]</font>

I'll let the resident astronomers give the authoritative answer. But:

Given two stars, it seems that the ratio of distances from the observer to each of the stars would bear on the magnitude of the apparent change in relative position of the two stars as the observer displaces. It also seems that the angle of separation from the observer's perspective would bear on it, especially if the observer displaces perpendicular to the bisection of that separation angle.

The worst case would be a very near star which is observed collinear with a very distant star (i.e., obscuring it). As the observer displaces perpendicular to this line of sight, the nearby star would appear to displace reciprocally, revealing the previously hidden distant star. The degree of this apparent reciprocal displacement would be given by quantifying the discussion above, which I'm frankly too lazy to do this afternoon.

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

Also, you have to take into account whether the position measurements are done in January or June.

Anyone familiar with my posts knows that I have good reasons to conclude that NASA put people on the moon. (And I still ban products that sponsored the Fox Moon Hoax show.) [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_wink.gif[/img]

Here's a question: (No Cameras involved.)
If you were on the moon (in a spacesuit of course,) and you walked behind a large bolder so you are in the shadow, and looked up. Through your faceplate, with the human eye and not a camera, could you see Jupiter, (as they did in 2001 - A Space Odyssey,) or perhaps Venus, Saturn, Sirius, or stars in general?

Also, if you were on the night side of the moon, would you see stars with your eyes, as well as the Milky Way?

Ed Mitchell reported that when he got in the shadow of something and let his eyes accustom to the dark sky, he could see stars and that they appeared, in his estimation, a magnitude brighter than from earth.

If you were on the dark side of the moon and earth weren't in the sky either, I imagine you would have a wonderful view of the stars.

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

Wow! Thanks. (Let's go.) [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_wink.gif[/img]

I think "A Man on the Moon" describes how the astronauts were amazed by the number of stars they saw when they were in the Moon's shadow (orbiting the Moon). This was particularly the case for the Command Module Pilots, who would've got a fair bit of this while their mates were hooning around on the Moon.

The seeing stars from space always gets me. I have talked with many astronauts, from Mercury to the ISS and all of them had said they see stars from space. At the most recent crew presentation (Last night), several of the astronauts made mention of this FACT. Furthermore, this is a pretty standard question from most of the kids in the audience.

[bad taste]

So NASA blew up the "Challenger" unnecessarily!

[/bad taste]

One of the Dark Lord's more appalling statements is that NASA blew up the "Challenger" to kill Christa McAuliffe because she refused to sign a contract saying you can't see stars in space. Have a look at the BA's link to the interview on the HB links page. I seriously wonder about the sanity of anyone who would say or believe that.

What always galls me about that claim is just how stupid it is. Why would NASA even allow the "Teacher in Space" program to go forward if they were going to have to include this person in the conspiracy? And as someone has pointed out before, there were far cheaper ways to end her career in space flight without blowing up a perfectly functional orbiter and killing seven people on live TV. It's like saying Pan Am blew up flight 103 because they feared the Co-Pilot would leak their financial difficulties to the press.

Even assuming that the HB's were on the right track, they could have simply grounded her because of a medical glitch, or if they felt they needed to kill her, a training accident is far less risky....

We don't him the Dark Lord Kaysing for nothing.

Bill Kaysing has, in many ways, gone off the deep end. I don't know whether it is the infirmity of advanced age, or the increasing pressure to explain away flaws in his theories, or some other cause. But in any other venue, such blatantly illogical and implausible ideas wouldn't be held for a second, and their proponent would be laughed out of polite company.

Kaysing's odd claims are still around only because there is a segment of fairly under-educated and unquestionably uncritical people who eat that stuff up. Couple this with popular media's need to parade clowns like this across the airwaves (the new circus midway), and you see why he hasn't faded into obscurity.

I strongly encourage the approach taken on this point. Many of the elements of the conspiracy theory I term "ad hoc" because they are devised to explain some particular set of observations. The effect is observed, and the scenario is postulated backward to cause. Rarely does a conspiracist postulate in the "forward" direction to see if the scenario actually makes sense as a sequence of unfolding historical events.

Indeed, if the visibility of the stars were so grave an issue that it warranted a highly public murder, why would NASA have let the problem escalate so far? Remember, these are people supposedly expert at keeping secrets. Why would they even risk revealing the hoax to someone they didn't already feel they could control?

The same argument holds for Brian Welch, the former NASA PAO chief who died unexpectedly of a heart attack after talking to hoax enthusiasts. Murdered?

It's not hard (and kind of fun) to put oneself in the position of a dastardly and devious NASA official trying to keep a secret. Indulge your creativity; how would you keep these secrets? The solutions you'll likely come up with bear very little resemblance to what the conspiracists claim must have been done. After a while thinking in this mode, it's easy to say to yourself, "Gad, what an entirely foolish way to maintain an illusion."

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

I checked on several of the landings by the simple expedient of running "Starry Night Pro", feeding it the correct lunar locations and times, and seeing what was visible. I don't recall spotting any of the planets (except Earth, naturally) but I did spot Vega. And I found one Apollo photograph which may actually *show* Vega! It's tricky, because most of the photos also have some smudges and other image artifacts which can confuse. (Especially for lazy people like me who just pull the compressed .jpgs off of NASA's website instead of getting higher quality prints to work with.) And you have to kind of guess on the camera's direction and field of view, without any real references for that information. But it's cool to think about anyway. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_wink.gif[/img]

Has anybody identified the star field in the apollo-16 UV view of Earth and environs?

I'd be willing to give it a go. Is the picture available online anywhere?

There is this this Apollo 16 photo, complete with stars. It was taken April 16, 1972 according to the caption. Looks to be early morning, west coast, so about 1400 UT?

The moon at that time was at Right ascension: 4h 14m 3.63s Declination: +24° 50' 20.4", the area opposite...arggh, someone has the software that does this, right??

I doubt that view of the Earth includes stars, more likely debris from the S4B LM extraction.

I can email the Apollo-16 image, write me at joberg@houston.rr.com for it.

My guesstimate is that you merely have to get the lunar ephemerus for that time, find the RA/dec of the moon, and invert. Look that up on a star chart.

What the h*ck is that?

And what are the particulars--date, time, distance, etc? [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img]

I got the image! Unfortunately I also got busy and didn't get the stars identified. But I did find some information about it as well: it was one of 178 images taken by the only ever lunar observatory. This observatory (which still stands, though it's basically useless without humans to run it) is a 3" telescope operating in ultraviolet: the Apollo 16 Far Ultraviolet Camera/Spectrograph. It produced images on film, so the astronauts had to return that film to EaRth to be developed. The picture was taken from the lunar surface at coordinates 8.97 S x 15.51 E sometime between April 20 and April 23, 1972. I'll post the identifying information as soon as I have it. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_wink.gif[/img] (I tried installing a really old planetarium program on my work computer, but it's being fussy. It may have to wait a little longer until I get home this evening.)