Please note this is entirely hypothetical, I understand why there are no star pictures, and that they wouldn't show different stars than a photo from earth.

Now let's assume the astronauts could have easily taken photos of the stars from the moon.

Has any HB ever given an explanation (other than handwaving), how they could determine that the star positions would be wrong?

I imagine they believe they could calculate the correct positions, but what would be stopping NASA from doing the same?

Well, it probably would be impossible to have stars. The thing is, if an actor (and the camera) starts at 20 meters distance from a wall that has stars painted on it, and moves to within 10 meters of that wall, then the distance between the painted stars would become larger, making it obvious that the painted stars are fairly close.

But on the other hand, the same thing should be true of the mountains. In the videos, the astronauts are seen walking and driving all over the place, but the mountains stay far away. If NASA had a set large enough to fake the mountains, then they should be able to fake stars.

But look at it this way. HBs also claim that the camera couldn't possbly work on the moon. IF you could see stars in apollo photos, then the HBs would find photos of night football games and since those photos don't have stars, they would say that HAVING stars in apollo photos is proof of hoax. No stars = hoax. Stars visible = hoax. That's the way it works in HB land.

You can go around in circles like this forever. A much better question is, if you were going to fake something, why would you give out *so* much data? If I was faking Apollo, there would have been only one landing. I would have made up some excuse to keep from going back. And there would have been perhaps a dozen pictures, and no video better than the Apollo 11 video. The more data you give people, the more likely you'll make a mistake. Where I work, we have legions of people with OCD and yet we still can't seem to produce a requirements/specification document without spelling errors. Yet somehow NASA produced thousands of images, hours of video, miles of documentation, and tones of hardware and the only "mistakes" are issues like the lack of stars and other "mistakes" that are easily explained.

I imagine they believe they could calculate the correct positions, but what would be stopping NASA from doing the same?

Nothing, of course. In addition to ignoring the fact that star positions are the same from the Moon as from the Earth, this claim debunks itself, since the ability of astronomers to determine if the star positions were wrong must mean that astronomer could tell what was right.

A variant of this claim is that NASA wouldn't have been able to portray the stars, regardless of positioning. I had a summer job as a planetarium operator once, and we were able to do that OK. Of course, we had a fancy Digistar projector, but the wonderful old bug-eyed monsters were accurately projecting stars decades before Apollo. It seems as if HBs have never set their collective foot inside a planetarium.

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"Slapping a guy on the head is just as funny now as it was eighty years ago."

Threadjack: the best date I've ever had in my life, so I have to relate this story - Digistar has a product demo animation that is very cool. One part of it is a giant mobius strip floating in space. The animation flies around it and when it makes the turns, you literally fall out of your seat. And there's other cool stuff too, like dolphins that turn into F-18s.

Anyway, I took a girl to a show and they did ordinary planetarium stuff. There were a group of kids there. It wasn't all that interesting to be perfectly honest. But being a geek, I chatted up the student who worked there and he showed me the computers and explained how everything worked and told me how cool the demo was. I managed to talk him into letting my girl and I stay afterwards and he played the demo and popped in a Sting CD.

Good lord, that was awesome. My dating life has been downhill ever since.

NASA did fake the stars. They used a sophisticated computer and projection system to calculate the exact position and apparent brightness of every star visible from the alleged landing point, and make them appear on the backdrops. The system tracked the movements of the astronauts' cameras, changing the visible stars as the cameras moved. But when they developed the film, they realized the stars weren't bright enough to show up.

You are joking, aren't you?

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"WARNING: Being launched into space is hazardous."--Lonewulf

Triplebrick is no longer birdable. It was fun while it lasted.

"N'oubliez pas: l'ours n'est pas un nounours!"--Nounours de Salmonberry

No....
They used a Quad Processor machine equipped with four AMD Athlon128 X16 22500+ processors and 1TB of RAM.

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"Who does not know anything, must believe everything."
Baroness Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach 1830-1916
our animal welfare board and organisation

The idea of such a thing even hypothetically happening made me laugh out loud.

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Spread the Love!

Digistars are made a short bike ride from my house, by people I know. They would be justifiably offended at the notion that they can't precisely and correctly put stars in a virtual sky.

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

Good one!

Funny first post; welcome to the board.

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"Slapping a guy on the head is just as funny now as it was eighty years ago."

No, but it's all handwaving. The HBer wouldn't be bringing these things up if they understood the concepts. Anyway, in my experience, star position a secondary issue for an HBer. The "discussion" normally starts with the classic "Why aren't there stars in the pictures?" question. After you patiently explain exposure issues, then they follow up with "Why aren't there some star pictures, then?" When you point out that Apollo 16 did take UV photos, they will insist they are fake for a variety of reasons. If the HBer actually is responding to questions, it quickly becomes obvious that they never understood the exposure answer, and were just throwing more questions at you, but aren't going to attempt to understand or be willing to accept an answer.

By the way, sometimes it isn't star position, but the number of stars and star color. Some think that on the moon, the sky should look like a Hubble image, full of multi-colored stars, nebulae, and so on. To some extent, that false expectation is the fault of the astronomy community for not being more careful to point out that those colors are picked because they help the scientist, they aren't what a mark 1 eyeball would see.

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

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

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

Evans and Sutherland, by any chance?

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"WARNING: Being launched into space is hazardous."--Lonewulf

Triplebrick is no longer birdable. It was fun while it lasted.

"N'oubliez pas: l'ours n'est pas un nounours!"--Nounours de Salmonberry

I am totally tired and fed up with conspiracy whackos that assert that we did not go to the moon.

The stars are not visible in most surface EVA photos because the camera exposures were set for daylight. The moon's surface was illuminated by the morning sun, so the stars were too dim to be exposed properly.


However, John Young took images of the Earth through a Far Ultraviolet camera and it actually recoded star images as well as the earth. You can see an aurora in the earth's magnetosphere, too.

See attached picture you fractured ceramic types....

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But that's obviously fake! It's such a pathetic image! It should look like this:

http://esamultimedia.esa.int/images/...e20040813a.jpg

Yes, they really do think it should be something like that.

__________________
I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

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

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

(blush) And I didn't think anyone noticed that out there in Webland... There's an even more subtle point to the UV background. The UV sky was only then being surveyed for the first time, and over most of the sky, there were as yet no other measurements to tell which stars would be UV-bright. This isn't always obvious, since some cool stars have hot companions that are quite faint in the visible. Some of the Apollo 16 exposures were a lot deeper than the ones aimed at Earth, showing very rich Milky Way fields. The spiral galaxy NGC 253 was detected (although with a 20-degree field, not very spectacular), and the Large Magellanic Cloud looks pretty cool in these data. I'm attaching a copy of that one.

(smacks head) Oh, no, another conspiracy possibility. The Orion-1 telescope on Salyut-1 had just been used in 1971 to start looking at the UV sky. Someone in The Conspiracy realized that this would compromise the plausibility of the faked Apollo 16 film which had already been loaded into the camera, and arranged to sabotage the Soyuz 11 pressure-equalization valve, thereby dooming the crew. Even so, useful UV exposures of two sky fields did exist on film recovered from the descent capsule. (I'd like to apologize for that, on the chance that this meme escapes into the wild).

Returning to our universe, it's useful for the UV-sky argument to note that the Apollo 16 pictures were published within a few months of the mission, before the TD-1 satellite had finished mapping all these parts of the sky in the UV. This was also well before Soyuz 13 flew with Orion-2 and observed a lot more of the sky in UV, which was during the final Skylab mission which carried Karl Henize's UV camera as well as a modified version of Carruther's Apollo 16 camera to give independent surveys of the UV sky.

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I know, I just wanted to try a different debunking approach.

Uh, because anyone away from all but the brightest of cities can see the stars with their naked eye?

That's like saying, "why not fake the Moon or the Sun."

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If I set the budget, we'd have Ares and more. Unfortunately, I don't set the budget, and Ares is just too expensive and too far out for us to accomplish our goals within the budget we were given.

If we halt the ISS, all versions of Ares, and transport Orion and Altair aboard DIRECTv3's Jupiter family of Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicles, we just might make it back to the Moon by 2020.

Maybe they didn't fake the stars in the fake moon landing because then astronomers would be able to say "Hey! Something is wrong here. Eventhough there is no atmosphere, the reflected light off the lunar surface and the brightness of the sun should assure that stars would NOT be visible to the eye or to standard visible light cameras" Thus, this would give away the fake.


Or...

Maybe they actually went.

Actually, they did have a fairly large set, which came preloaded with stars and mountains in all the right positions. It was located quite a distance away, and required a good bit of ingenuity and a few days travel to reach it.

The name of that set was "The Moon."

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If I set the budget, we'd have Ares and more. Unfortunately, I don't set the budget, and Ares is just too expensive and too far out for us to accomplish our goals within the budget we were given.

If we halt the ISS, all versions of Ares, and transport Orion and Altair aboard DIRECTv3's Jupiter family of Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicles, we just might make it back to the Moon by 2020.

The "no stars because they couldn't fake them in the right positions" argument is a real doozy. Do those who argue this not realise that over the course of a year the position of the Earth moves millions of miles across space as we orbit the Sun.

However, Orion still looks like Orion and The Plough still looks like The Plough whether I see them on 5 March or 5 September (six months apart so, presumably, as far away from each other as two positions of the planet get). Given that, a 250k mile hop to the moon is not going to make the stars look any different to the way they look from Earth.

Or maybe ... the no stars argument is made by those who also believe that the universe revolves around the Earth?

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Dave

Anyone seen my marbles? Anyone ... ?

The trouble with posing a question, from the standpoint of the ignorant in order to provide question and answer before they ask or react is that you risk getting mauled in the process.
I tried it once on here. Didn't try that again, I tell you what...

The Moon is ~a quarter of a million miles away. The Earth travels that distance every four hours as it orbits the Sun. 'nuff said.

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"Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures - in this century, as in others, our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together." St. Exupery

From my lurking experience the real mauling only occurs if
- the asker simply ignores the answers and restates his "problem"
or
- the asker ignores the answers and changes to the next point on the "already debunked proof-list"

Ummmm I think you didn't understand what I typed.

Nah--that's just a Rothko painted during one of his 'stoned' days.