LOL! I said the same thing about Vermont. (and yes I was kidding.)

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Martin, unless you are able to get into space and orbit the moon with a very good telescope, it is extremely unlikely you will be able to see it directly through a telescope from here on earth, optical resolution is just not good enough. That is unless the mirror is the size of Manhattan, or London (I know it needs to be large, but not entirely sure how big!? I'm sure someone will add this information!!)

There are so many other events that I am sure you DO believe happened, such as the sinking of the Titannic, WW1, the Wright Brothers first flight, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Florida Marlins winning the World Series in 1997. All of these events were well documented, some a lot more than others, and we believe they happened becuase of what we know from history.

Both the Mercury missions (7, I think) and Geminii missions (12, I think) were a testing ground and a lead into the Apollo programme and ALL of these programmed missions were followed in great detail by the press of the time. from these we have thousands upon thousands of detailed photographs, film and video footage, documentation, left over artifacts, and many hundreds of thousands of scientists, engineers, and people who worked on the projects throughout the very late 50's, 60's and early 70's. Many of these people continued onto other space programme work, but also many thousands left or had to be let go as Apollo came to an end and space funding was reduced.

There is also about 800kgs of moon rocks returned by the astronauts, which many of the worlds top geologists have studied and all agree they are not rocks found anywhere on earth. Many of these geologists are from countries with no alleigiance to the US, in fact some were openly hostile during the cold war years.

So with the sheer weight of evidence in favour of the Apollo moon programme and landings, which must be massively in excess of many of the events I listed above, there are still people who still believe the moon landings were in some way hoaxed, yet never seem able to produce any actual concrete evidence to prove it. We often end up with "it just doesn't look right" (well then, what SHOULD pictures of the moon look like?), and a lack of interest or understanding about the science involved.

Yet these same people are still happy to believe that the Wright Brothers contraption actually flew ("I mean, have you SEEN it? It's all string and wood and cloth - can't possibly have flown...."), the Titannic sank ("I'm QUITE SURE they would have spotted something as big as an iceberg, that could do that much damage, much earlier...").... etc ... etc.....

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"Entering the lottery defines you as a gambler; supporting SETI defines you as a human ... with passion and hope for the future." - Cosmopaul67 - 28th Jan 2010

Are we alone in the Universe? Are we the only intelligent life? Who knows? But the universe is so BIG, it somehow seems such a waste of space if we are ....

I saw him fly over my house once...

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Happy to oblige The resolution of an optical telescope operating under perfect conditions is about 0.8" divided by the diameter of the telescope. We need to place the telescope at earth, so that everyone can verify that no false images are inserted by evil MIB. If we assume that we need to resolve features no more than 10cm big at a distance of 364,567km (perigee) -- a conservative guess at least in my eyes -- the resolving power has to be at least 0.6mas and minimum aperture size is then about 1400 meters.

I suppose telescope technology could push this value down (3.6m wide CFHT at Hawaii has a PSF of only 0.13"), but we need to keep the system simple for those who want to inspect our little telescope

Just a quick note, I've seen a bit of confusion on the mass of the returned moon rock, presumably due to unit conversion. There was a total of about 379 kg or ~834 pounds of moon rock.

See here, for instance:

http://www.nasm.si.edu/research/ceps...ls_return.html

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Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

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Yeah, sorry! I do remember (now!) that it was "about 800 pounds" of moon rock, not 800kgs! It's funny how you remember these things once someone tells you ......

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The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not Eureka! (I found it!) but rather, 'hmm.... that's funny...'
- Isaac Asimov

"Entering the lottery defines you as a gambler; supporting SETI defines you as a human ... with passion and hope for the future." - Cosmopaul67 - 28th Jan 2010

Are we alone in the Universe? Are we the only intelligent life? Who knows? But the universe is so BIG, it somehow seems such a waste of space if we are ....

Isn't it though? No big. I see this every now and then. With different units, it's easy to make a mistake.

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Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

Just ask NASA.

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Quantumfoamy.com, my astronomy/astrophotography blog.

Just ask NASA.

Actually, that was Lockheed-Martin's screw up. NASA just didn't catch LM's mistake.

Oh, good news, btw. Lockheed-Martin has the contract for the next moon mission.

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hope someone explains metric to them

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True enough. OTOH, it was NASA that was out both the money and the data from the probe.

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Sleep? Isn't that that totally inadaquate substitute for caffeine I've heard so much about?

Quantumfoamy.com, my astronomy/astrophotography blog.

It could have been worse, I mean it's not like they dropped a multimillion dollar satelite, or installed some switches up the wrong way or anything.......

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Apollo: The History and the Hoax
Enter the World of Athran

Also make sure that it is a direct vision telescope (so one with an eyepiece), because "nobody" will believe an image shown on a computer monitor.

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And you know what they can do with smoke and mirrors, so that pretty much limits it to refractors, right?

Ouch! And a nuclear plant to power the tracking drive

Ah very good, no smoke. I was going to use a water wheel.

I'm convinced, and writing a book tentatively entitled 'The Landscape Theory of Reality'.

Has anyone mentioned the fact that the McDonald Observatory still uses the equipment left on the moon by the Apollo missions?





If NASA never made it to the moon, I'd love to know just what hoax enthusiasts think they're bouncing a laser off of up there.

Most claim that a man never stepped on the moon, so hence the reflectors must have been put there by remote control.

The Russians did it remotely, but the mirrors are not aligned properly so don't work (very well or at all?)

To be honest, I didn't even know that the Russians landed a craft on the moon at all

Pete

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There's so much I don't know about astrophysics. I wish I had read that book by that wheelchair guy.

At least once per each hoax thread.

The Russians did it remotely, but the mirrors are not aligned properly so don't work (very well or at all?)

This was on the Lunokhod 2 Rover (Luna 21.) It wasn't positioned very well, but it does work.

To be honest, I didn't even know that the Russians landed a craft on the moon at all

Check out the Luna Programme

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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 probably saw pictures from the program, but didn't realize the pictures were Russian.

It's a shame we don't hear much about it...especially from the last paragraph
(From the above link)


Later

Pete

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PJE

There's so much I don't know about astrophysics. I wish I had read that book by that wheelchair guy.

This is often stated on these boards but I don't think it is correct. Both Apollo and Lunokhod used corner reflectors which don't have to be precisely aligned. It was why they were used. The reason that the Lunokhod reflectors don't return as strong a signal is because they are much smaller that the Apollo ones.

Jon

And only ROUFLs (refractors of unusual focal length), say, f/30 or greater, since one would have to use a single element objective and single element eyepiece (preferably a negative meniscus) to avoid being duped into seeing something placed between the elements (I know this would be out-of-focus, but tell that to an HB) or at the focus of the eyepiece.

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This is often stated on these boards but I don't think it is correct.

My understanding of the matter is that when misaligned they present a smaller surface area for the laser being reflected to strike, and so this degrades the signal even further beyond that experienced by the passage to the moon and back. Because of this, the reflector on Lunokhod 2 works to a lesser amount than it should if it was properly aligned. It is possible that the poor alignment is partially due to it losing power prior to when they wanted it too, but I believe they had a lot of trouble aligning it even before that. The Apollo ones were done by hand, and the deployee was on the spot to check the alignment, giving the experiment the maximum surface area possible and thus a better signal.

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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

My understanding of corner reflectors is that they are quite tolerant of considerable misalignment. If they are too mis-aligned then of course they don't work. But looking at the optical geometry, they should work up to angles of 45 degrees way from axis. But i would be glad of correction on this.

The Apollo reflectors used 300 cells, the Lunokhod one 14 cells. The Apollo reflector and an area of 2116 cm2, the Lunokhod one 260 cm2. I think these alone are enough to explain the different signal strengths. The Lunokhod 2 reflector is working, that of Lunokhod 1 is not. However severe misalignment (which probably means soemthing like the rover turned turtle) is only of several possible explanations. Others include the rover lid closing over it, or failure in an orientation where an antenna is between the reflector and Earth.

Jon

Hmmm, yeah, looking into it deeper, I think you're right. It looks like the trouble they had with Lunokhod 1 has lead to the idea that the soviet ones weren't as effective.

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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

Something else I discovered on looking through pages was that Luna 24's sample return was a 1.6m core sample. Not as good at the 2.4m cores of Apollo, but still impressive.

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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

By coincidence I watched a prog tonight about the race to the Moon and they had a guy on who rides up to the laser equipment and fires it at the moon every day, he's done the job since the reflectors were placed. I didn't get his name!

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