I figure here would be a better place to find out what this actually is.

http://shadowboxent.brinkster.net/moon/esjmoon.html

It looks kind of odd and I have no clue what it could be. It could be a real lunar mystery or a trick of perception. Any ideas? :-?

It's hard to tell anything from such low res images.

One possibility is a booster engine sent to impact the surface(rather than orbit the earth as junk) either outgassing or just then hitting.

Any other possibilities???

__________________
Hanlon's Razor - "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
Asimov's addition - "Or ignorance."

"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
-- Charles Babbage

Could the 'puff' be a shadow on a slanted surface from a descending object? I'm trying to visualize where the sun is but my threedeecampus has quit working for the weekend.

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If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.

In my video tape collection I happen to have a copy of the NOVA special, To The Moon, which this footage is supposedly taken from.

Let me review the tape and I'll get back to you all.

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"The facts gentlemen, and nothing but the facts, for careful eyes are narrowly watching." Isaac Asimov

Very good point. Thank you.

I note on the site that the GIF has been 'enhanced'. Uh-huh.

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If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.

Well, that didn't take long now did it?

First off, that website gives an accurate representation of what was shown on the NOVA show. A black spire appears to be belching black smoke and then the smoke dissappears. There's just one little problem...

That particular sequence is of a STILL picture which the NOVA camera zooms in on, giving the appearance of movement where there is none. In other words, it has to be an artifact from the show, because it's kinda hard to have movement in a STILL picture.

Mystery solved.

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"The facts gentlemen, and nothing but the facts, for careful eyes are narrowly watching." Isaac Asimov

Dang! They did a Ken Burns!

Classic magician's trick. Get you watching the little spot in the center, fail to notice what's going on around the edge of the frame.

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If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.

Thank you! I love it!
=D>

Added note. I grabbed the first and last Jpegs off the site and supered the last frame on the first after resizing to same earth size. Seamless fit. No shifts, which you would expect in a 70 mi orbit.

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If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.

Ah, so you are saying they had a still picture from Apollo. The camera filming the TV program then zoomed in on that still photo.

That makes it seem as if this is a movie made on the Apollo capsule, when it was actually a still photo taken on the capsule.

To check on this, I did a web search using the words "Apollo 8 photograph earth horizon" and the first hit returned was the JSC Digital Image Collection. In there is this image. Look at it carefully. I am sure it's the exact still photograph used in the NOVA program. The bumps and wiggles on the lunar horizon are all there, and the angle and height of the Earth over the horizon are the same.

In the first frame of the LEMUR sequence, you see a black diagonal fuzzy border in the lower right corner. In the JSC image, you can see that this is the edge of the capsule window! This is not in subsequent frames, which supports the idea that the NOVA show was in fact zooming in on a still photo, and is not showing actual footage; that is, motion photography. Moreover, the text for the image specifically says that the film was 70mm; this was what was used in the Haselblad still cameras.

Case closed. Nice work, R.A.F.

Incidentally, it took me literally less than one minute to find the image used. One minute. I received an email from this LEMUR group about this "footage" the other day; it was done like a press release. Obviously, with a trivial amount of effort, the LEMUR claims can be shown to be completely wrong.

I've said it before, and it's just as true today: I love this board.

__________________
Phil Plait
The Bad Astronomer
http://www.badastronomy.com
badastro@badastronomy.com

Oh, one more thing: I posted about this on the L.E.M.U.R. bulletin board. Let's see what happens next. Here's the link: http://members5.boardhost.com/shadow.../msg/1456.html

... and here is what I posted:

It's likely motion blur in the frame capture.

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

Me too! =D>

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~~ ><>><> ~~ ><,,> ><,,> ...`;=;p d;=;' /\/\^/\ ^^ ^/\/\_
Democracy Now! - The lost art of investigative news reporting.

This is also being "discussed" (I use that term loosely) over onthe OSA forum here
http://kbs.msshost.com/Forum3/viewto...amp;highlight=
I gave a short explanation but others may want to swing by and back me up.

__________________
"Eternal vigilance is the price of supremacy"
------------Mark Twain

"Women are like Voltron. The more you can hook up, the better it gets."

Just checked that out and...well at least they're keeping a good sense of humor about it. :wink:

This is also being "discussed" (I use that term loosely) over onthe OSA forum here

They're clearly one step ahead of the rest of us.

Thanks, BA, happy to have helped. (My wife claims that I'm strutting around the house this morning).

Agreed, I was quite surprised how simple this mystery was to solve. I spent perhaps 5 minutes looking for the tape, maybe another 4 or 5 to locate the scene in question, and then it took less than 10-20 seconds to figure out where they went wrong. I'm wondering if LEMUR has actually watched the NOVA show.

I'll add my "me too" here. Ya gotta love a place where knowledge is shared for the benefit of all.

Joshua P. Warren, president of L.E.M.U.R. has answered your post. (He calls it a "theory"...HA HA) While I won't say he's making excuses, (I'm trying to be polite here), he does seem to be having trouble wrapping his mind around the fact that he is wrong about this.

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"The facts gentlemen, and nothing but the facts, for careful eyes are narrowly watching." Isaac Asimov

Gee, it's really pretty simple. If you go to the Louvre and you shoot some shaky, hand-held video of the Mona Lisa and when you get home it looks like she's winking at you in a couple of the frames, where do you look for an answer? Do you unparsimoniously conclude that a painting just winked at you? Or do you conclude that some aspect of the motion of your camera caused the effect? Just because you have some frames captured from a Nova program doesn't automatically make them Apollo movie frames. This is why real research isn't done from secondary sources. You never know where those sources have been.

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

And judging from the state of affairs I don't think anyone of us wants to know where these particular secondary sources have been.........

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Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

Here's a pretty bizarre thread from that LEMUR forum:

http://members5.boardhost.com/shadow.../msg/1451.html

[Shudder]

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

Bizarre isn't even the word I'd use. I mean, really, what pyramid?
This picture doesn't even show the surface of the Moon! It's just reflections of different things on the window of the LM. The background is SPACE. Maybe it's a flying space pyramid!!

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"The facts gentlemen, and nothing but the facts, for careful eyes are narrowly watching." Isaac Asimov

Ummm....yeah :roll:

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Why does "monosyllabic" have 5 syllables?

On the image in the article, you can see the entire terminator on the earth's disc above the lunar horizon. In the photo from the JSC collection, the terminator appears to intersect the lunar horizon. Could the two photos be different or is the disparity likely to result from the low resolution of the JSC photo? Is it possible that another photo was taken very soon after (or before, I'm not sure what direction the CSM is orbiting w.r.t. the image) the JSC photo?

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~AstroMike

It looks like there's a possibility that I was right for once.

Yeah, it looks like I had the wrong picture above. The one used in the NOVA footage was taken a short time after the one I linked (there was only that one on the JSC page, but AstroMike found the series of photographs taken). Anyway, the principle is the same. It was a still photo, and the NOVA folks zoomed on it.

I read elsewhere that the show actually zoomed out, but the L.E.M.U.R. folks reversed it. Not sure why. I may have seen the NOVA show, but if I did it was many years ago, so I don't remember. R.A.F., was it zoomed in or out?

What on earth is the poster Tonopah Test Range on about over at the LEMUR forum?

Tonopah Test Range wrote a post, that has now been deleted, wherein he said something along the lines of there being more computing power in a musical greeting card than available to Apollo spacecraft.

I replied with the following:

Tonpah Test Range,
All ridicule of Apollo's rate of progress and the computing power available to Apollo Spacecraft aside, could you demonstrate to us that the Apollo spacecraft were not actually up to the task? Can you demonstrate that the computers used on Apollo were actually insufficient?

To which he has now replied:

You are asking me to demonstrate how a computing system is deficient in accomplishing a task which I don't believe has been accomplished in the first place? Do you see the illogical conundrum here?

Am I missing something, or does this not make any sense?

The thread starts here.