Kramponz? Because it would be uncessary (the lunar explorers weren't climbing mountains), they would have added too much weight (which would mean less of more vital equipment) and they would have been dangerous (two astronauts wearing spike-covered boots and trundling around at 60lbs but with all the inertia of 360lbs? Noooo thanks!)

JayUtah wrote:

Prediction is hard, especially when it's about the future.

Hey Jay...can I steal that quote if you don't want it?!

__________________
Why does "monosyllabic" have 5 syllables?

The quote was originally said by either Niels Bohr or Yogi Berra, depending on whom you believe.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

Thanks Sticks. It's the "it must be on the web somewhere" part of it that is a problem! I have the images as jpegs on my PC and don't know anyone who administers a website (wheres I is from, we don't hold with all them newfangled 'electrickery' doohickeys. It's witchcraft I tells ya! ).

__________________
"I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day." - Douglas Adams

"Certainly, in the topsy-turvy world of heavy rock, having a good solid piece of wood in your hand is often useful." - Ian Faith

Regarding the albedo of the salt flats -- numerous pictures here
Rice-Vigeant G/Gas Lakester at Bonneville (one of the drivers is a regular over at JREF)
Utah Salt Flats Racing Association World of Speed Album #1
Utah Salt Flats Racing Association World of Speed Album #2

Photos of the Moon with stars:
There is only one way you will ever see or photograph the Moon surrounded by stars at the same time.

This is a 20-second or so time exposure with 400 speed film through a 135mm lens (if i recall correctly) of the fully eclipsed Moon last November (recognize the Pleaides off to the left?)

A full Moon at full brilliance will wash out the surrounding stars to the naked eye, and if properly exposed for the Moon, the stars are underexposed to the point of not being in the photograph.

No ultra-trick paid NASA disinformation cameras, film, or processing, just an eBay Pentax K-1000, a 135mm lens, and Walgreen's inexpensive 400 speed film and one-hour photo processing. If I can do it, anyone can...

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"If a tree is cut down in the rainforest, and is used to make paper to print a book, and the book is really bad, and there's nobody that will read it, do you still hear a sucking sound?"
Charlie in Dayton, A.AsC.

You say there was a lunar eclipse occuring at this time? Even, the moon stills looks like the kind of sun you see on SF. I think that if HBers saw that, they'd probably think it proves their point, failing to realise it isn't showing the sun. It's kind of like that photo of the aurora on Earth with stars above and bright blue Earth below. It was a moonlit Earth.

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Freedom For Fission A breath of fresh Iodine-131

Prediction is hard, especially when it's about the future.

-- Yogi Berra

Sorry, it's not mine to give.

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

Thanks to Datacable ( =D> ), here are the photos I mentioned earlier. These photos were actually taken to demonstrate the effects of emulsion bleed, but as a result of the change in aperture & exposure, considerable detail is visible in the background shadow of the second photo where the background in the first is just black.

(Click on the image for the full size version)



Then, seconds later, opening up the aperture & extending the exposure time:

__________________
"I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day." - Douglas Adams

"Certainly, in the topsy-turvy world of heavy rock, having a good solid piece of wood in your hand is often useful." - Ian Faith

Hi Folks.

Thanks again for all the intelligent replies.

I believe I'll soon be winding down here as you've all widened my view of things--particularly on shadows and moon-walking. I still hold on the position that we probably went to the Moon, and that most conspiracists are fools--but again, it could have been faked and we could be being lied to.

As for "predicting the future," if memory serves me, in Alvin Toffler's (Future Shock, Megatrends) book War/Anti-war: I believe he cited it as an ancient Chinese saying.


AGN Fuel

By primative I meant those who lived in earlier times or similar conditions--say pre-neolithic. Subject peoples--such as the Egyptians--would likely have had it worse. But what of, say an Amazonian, for whom toil was a fraction of ours, work non-specialised, and eating a variety of foods rich in vitamins and protein.


As for Neil's and Buzz's descriptions, these are of course, alleged members of the conspiracy. Also there is the question of adhesiveness and cohesiveness. If I stuck my boot into a child's swimming pool of muck, a lot of it would adhere to my boot, but it would leave no print. If I stuck an oiled boot into clay, it would leave a print, but not adhere.


Yes, which conspiratist alleged wasn't really from the Moon--I read somewhere that some of it might have been from Antarctica--the same place we got that Martian rock suggesting life on that planet.

Quote:

Quote: Are you therefore saying that the Earth's atmosphere has nothing to do with the lack of stars near the Moon in your photograph? That is exactly what I am saying. And I will say it again for emphasis - the Earth's atmosphere is not the reason that I cannot see stars in my photo of the moon.

In that case I defer to your expertise. As for me, the closest I came to astronomical photography was taking pictures of a solar eclipse with a 110 instamatic.

Still, I wonder. What would happen if there was a terrific bonfire--say 200 meters away from me, and at 10 meter incriments, there was a person standing, each holding a candle. Could one get both candle and fire on the same film? If so, could it be done with a relatively lightweight camera made before 1972?


Hmmm. So you're saying that to blacken one grain, you need 1 000 photons?

If however, of that naked eye starlight's 200 photons per second become 0.2 recorded on a plate, then in 200 seconds we get 40 photons--would that be enough for the 50 grains?

How many photons does it take to blacken one grain?



Thanks Sticks for the imaging advice. I'll try it right now.





Bill S.

What I'm referring too shouldn't weigh more than a few lbs--if that.

Nope Sticks, it worked on neither preview nor submission, but what I had in mind was a bit of a shot, hence your advice remains valid.

Yippie!! It worked!!

Thanks Sticks!!!

No, the Apollo missions could not have been faked without the fraud being discovered and revealed a very long time ago. There's probably not another historical event that has undergone the amount of worldwide historical and scientific scrutiny that the Apollo missions have endured, with continuing validation of the missions' reality. There is no plausable alternate viewpoint. This is not something still "in question." The missions happened essentially as their many participants claimed.

May people read your assertion, die Nullte, 100 years from now!!

Methinks not so much Great Satan, as Devil's Advocate...... :wink:

I do not know. I am not an anthropologist. If I were to hazard a guess however, I still would have expected that a ripe old age under those conditions would be the exception rather than the rule.

Maybe, although I'll touch on that later. But what then of the hundreds of geologists around the world who examined the returned samples? The regolith samples contain features that clearly identify them as lunar - in particular, specific isotope ratios that are unlike terrestrial samples. Also, glass spherules indicating rapid formation in extreme heat, consistent with meteorite impact, the nature of the mechanical fracturing leading to the shape of the grains (and subsequently explaining their cohesiveness), the lack of erosive features, the zap pits, the fact the samples are completely anhydrous, and their age! The youngest lunar samples are older than the oldest terrestrial samples.

Now bear in mind that the Soviets managed a return sample mission that successfully brought back a few grams of regolith material. The Soviets also had access to the Apollo material and their scientists would undoubtedly have compared their samples with the the US samples. Differences would have been identified and queried immediately.

Now, regarding Armstrong & Aldrin. Ignoring the question of their personal qualities of integrity & morality which would argue against their involvement, let's assume for a moment that they are part of a hoax. They are immediately placed in a completely impossible position. Every single one of their 'faked' descriptions of the lunar environment (and those of the other five Apollo missions that landed on the lunar surface) is going to have to be perfectly consistent with the environment encountered by later missions from different nations. The future of mankind is in space and the moon is our next door neighbour, the first stepping stone - and it was seriously envisaged that many people from around the world would travel to & be working on the moon by now. How to reconcile the 'made up' faked decriptions of the lunar surface with the subsequent confirmed findings? How could NASA possibly avoid the inevitable mea culpa - 'Yep, you got us, the moon really is made of green cheese". How could the 'bogus' Armstrong/Aldrin description so consistent with the Soviet sample return mission?

How? Simple - Armstrong & Aldrin really did report from the lunar surface.


And your point is...? The regolith is fine grained, but very 'jagged'. As a result, it is extremely cohesive. Contrary to what the woo-woos say, water is not a necessity to make a footprint - the extreme cohesiveness of the grains alone was enough to maintain the shape of the footprints. The mechanical nature of the regolith, as demonstrated in analysis by geologists across the globe, is consistent with the ability to make a footprint and to adhere to the astronauts EMUs.

Which suggestion conveniently ignores the fact that the better part of half a ton of material was returned from the 6 Apollo landings, whereas only a few kilos of lunar meteoritic material has subsequently been recovered in the intervening 30+ years; and secondly, meteorites inevitably show evidence of their entry through the Earth's atmosphere. The lunar samples show no such evidence - in fact the contrary, they show 'zap pits'. Unlike the Earth, the moon has no atmosphere to protect the surface against the relentless micro-meteor bombardment. These micrometeors strike the surface unimpeded and leave characteristic zap pits in the lunar samples. Such evidence would be obliterated by the ablation and melting caused by an atmospheric entry.

Of course (even though the bonfire will likely appear as undifferentiated, amorphous blob of light). But then, your example is not a realistic comparison, is it? The people holding the candles who are closer, will have their candles brighter in accordance with the inverse square law. A candle only a few centimetres from the camera may well have a comparable brightness to the 200m distant bonfire if you use a photometer to measure the flux. But so what? We are talking about the respective brightnesses of stars and the Earth as seen from the lunar surface!

Not sure if I agree with your maths on this (or understand the point you are driving at, to be frank). At 200 photons per second, after 200 seconds there will have been a total of 40,000 photons integrated. The conversion rate of the emulsion is at 0.2% of the incident photons (your number - Smith quotes 0.1%), so such an integration will blacken 80 grains and by the definition quoted above (i.e >50 blackened grains) will provide an image. So by doubling the sensitivity of the emulsion, you have been able to produce an image in 3 minutes instead of 4. But the point is - to photograph the Earth from the moon will require an exposure of a fraction of a second, not 3 minutes. There are orders of magnitude difference. You can no more photograph the Earth from the moon and expect to see stars than I could use a microphone in Sydney to pick up a salsa band playing in Caracas.

__________________
"I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day." - Douglas Adams

"Certainly, in the topsy-turvy world of heavy rock, having a good solid piece of wood in your hand is often useful." - Ian Faith

Here is why I think the Apollo astronauts could not have photographed both the Earth and the surrounding stars in the same image--assuming they would have wanted reasonable exposures for both. I will show my work:

The apparent visual magnitude of the full Moon from Earth is -12.7. Sirius, the brightest star, has a magnitude of -1.5. The full Moon, then, is:

10^((-1.5 - -12.7) / 2.5) = 30200

times brighter than the brightest star.

The global average annual albedo of the Earth is around 0.30. The average albedo of the Moon is typically specified as 0.07. The Earth, then, is about 100,000 times brighter than the brightest stars.

The latitude or dynamic range of film is the range of the brightest to the darkest subject features the film can record. The dynamic range of modern Ektachrome E200 film--the closest I could find to the Ektachrome 160-speed film used by Apollo--is about 720 to 1:

http://www.kodak.com/global/en/profe...009_0059ac.gif

(The range of exposure along the horizontal axis, expressed in log units is between 2.8 and 2.9. 10 raised to that power is about 720.)

The film's range of 720 to 1 is, of course, much too narrow to squeeze in the 100,000-to-1 brightness range of Earth to the brightest stars. The astronauts could have photographed either a properly-exposed Earth or properly-exposed stars, but not both in the same exposure.

Thanks for the nice words; I'm not with the Trek franchise anymore (though I find a lot of people assume I designed the NX-01. Weird). Hollywood design jobs are all going to computer animators scattered across the globe, so I've started my own art and model company, Space Model Systems. Yeah, I did get to design a boatload of spacecraft and props over the years, and with any luck I'll keep doing it when the right film projects come along, but I'll do a lot of my own spacecraft designs as resin kits in the meantime.

I've never been a closet Apollo geek. On the contrary, I've been right out there in the open since the early 1960s. I witnessed three Apollo launches from the Cape, including being at the press site for A13, so I dare say that qualifies me as a hard core space fanatic Check out the Saturn V decals on my site if you want to talk fiddly little fanatical detail.

Rick
www.spacemodelsystems.com

Rick, were you at the Apollo 15 liftoff? I thought you sounded familiar!

Apollo 13. Watched through binocs as the stack rose up on the blackest sooty smoke and most intensely orange fire, then had to look down abruptly because my pant legs were flapping. Almost forgot to get my eyes back on the stack to follow it out of sight.

A11 I saw from the