I never believed in the silly Moon hoax theory. But now we have photos of LROC and obviously many people will start to claim that NASA has photoshopped these images.

My question is: Is it really possible to photoshop a lunar lander on an existing image without getting caught? I read somewhere that you can still run mathematical tests pixel by pixel to see if there's additional work and still won't find it. But I'm not an expert in this field so I'm looking for your opinion.

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Svetoslav Alexandrov, B.Sc. in Molecular Biology
A human return to the Moon is always 15 years in the future. A human mission to Mars is always 30 years in the future. This is the sad truth.

How would you find out from a pixel when it was added?

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You're probably never going to get around the average HB's belief that some sort of graphic manipulation is involved, which is ironic since so many of them probably use Photoshop themselves to dress up Apollo photos with artificial artifacts and fancy themselves experts. Even if you showed them the raw data line by line from the LROC itself they'll likely claim it had been carefully crafted beforehand in a 3-D computer program, skinned up to look like the lunar landing sites and then beamed to any convenient satellite for downloading. I'm sure there are many long-winded technical ways to explain their authenticity to them, but then their eyes glaze over and their short attention spans snap.

I don't fully expect the HB delusion to shut down until regular flights to the moon become a reality if they ever do. Even with overwhelming proof to the contrary, you still have your flat-earthers today.

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What happens on the event horizon, stays on the event horizon.

Well, I'm not an expert. I'm looking for a counter argument to the Photoshop claim.

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Svetoslav Alexandrov, B.Sc. in Molecular Biology
A human return to the Moon is always 15 years in the future. A human mission to Mars is always 30 years in the future. This is the sad truth.

Theoretically the incoming data stream could be captured and taken off-site by an indepenant party. This material could theoretically be analyzed and compared against the official picture. Theoretically. It's not like the incoming data is some superfortress (unless it has some form of elaborate encryption) and therefore could be independantly received as well. I know here at the TV studios we can theoretically received telemetry from the ISS, Shuttle or Soyuz spacecraft. We just don't have the decoders.

BTW at least one HB is claiming the LRO pictures have the tracks added by ink. Kind of strange when you consider the images are digital.

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"TV online! Goldstone TV online! Honeysuckle video online!!"

Once a person gets a notion into their head, it is really hard to change it.

I've seen a person stand right in front of something and look at it, all the time denying that it exists or is doing what it looks to be doing, all because that person already knew ahead of time that these things were done in a different specific way.

umm, hello, it is right there!

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"I'm as accurate as any psychic. And I'm a cartoon!" -- Squidward

"Arrrgh, the laws of physics be a harsh mistress!" -- Bender

Like using white-out to correct spelling errors on your monitor?

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

Would you care to explain that story in a bit more detail? It sounds like a "boy look" taken to the nth degree!

I have no knowledge of Photoshop software, or how data is transmitted, but I think that it would be possible in theory.

The way I see it is that if you were to take a location on the Moon, a LM Descent Stage sitting on it would look a particular way. Therefore, an image of the location would look a particular way. It should therefore be theoretically possible to determine what the greyness of each pixel in the location should be in order to produce the desired image. All you need to do then (!!) is take the image and change the greyness of those pixels.

However, this clam is in the same group as many of the lighting claims made by Apollo Hoaxers. It can thus can be answered in the same way: if you think that's how it works, give us an example. In this case, it means providing an image with a LM Descent Stage Photoshopped into it, and seeing who can pick the fake.

If the only reason people can pick the fake is because the LM isn't at any known Apollo landing sites, then perhaps there's something to the original claim. However, it doesn't prove it.

Two examples. Once was in a manufacturing plant, where sandblasting was used to cut letters into stone. A visitor insisted that the letters were painted on, even though he was standing directly in front of the sandblast unit, and was in fact talking to the worker who operated it.

Another example, a tour of a facility that cared for mentally disabled people. The visitor had a preconceived notion that the children in the home were fed in troughs like pigs. He continued to pester the tour guide with questions about the troughs, even after he was shown the dining facilities. Eventually the tour guide gave him directions to a non existent location and sent him off by himself to find the feed troughs, just to get him away from the tour group.

If I tax my poor memory, I could probably think of some more I have encountered.

Astro related, there was a video that came out a number of years ago, it started with interviews of people graduating from college and they asked them what caused the moon's phases and most of them got it wrong. Then it went to a school and looked at the impact a traditional teaching style has on learning, and then used the best student as an example. The student was a young girl who had somehow come up with the notion that planetary orbits are figure 8 shaped, or maybe it was the notion that light somehow bounced off space giving us our seasons (This was awhile ago and I do not remember for certain and I don't recall the name of the video. ASP used to sell it, but I don't see it on their website now). The notion stuck in her brain, and when the teacher provided new information, she first tried to incorporate the new information into what she already knew. In other words, the old idea wouldn't go away. It was only when she was given models and asked probing questions that she was able to figure it out for herself and finally understood how it worked.

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"I'm as accurate as any psychic. And I'm a cartoon!" -- Squidward

"Arrrgh, the laws of physics be a harsh mistress!" -- Bender

It would be possible although rather difficult to properly Photoshop in the LM descent stages, shadows, and astronaut and rover tracks without leaving trace evidence of the hoax job. Why? Because unfortunately the LRO suffers from jitter which appears to be mostly confined to the horizontal and vertical axes in the photos. This jitter creates weird effects which are especially visible at the edges of extremely dark-to-bright shadow lines in the images, but aren't visible on areas of the images which feature larger and fairly evenly lit areas. In other words, think of the LROC images as having both vertical and horizontal motion banding and streaking artifacts created by spacecraft jitter.

LRO jitter appears to be the worst for the horizontal axis in the images, appears to be almost exactly but not quite 3 pixels in width, and appears to be a sine wave in terms of intensity profile -- which is what one would expect. The LRO's vertical axis jitter is considerably less, and appears to amount to only 1 pixel. Thus, it appears that the LRO camera's actual horizontal axis resolution is only 33% of its theoretical diffraction limited resolution and that the LRO camera's actual vertical axis resolution is only 50% of its theoretical diffraction limited resolution. See the LRO jitter for yourself by downloading the LROC photos of the Apollo landing sites and then zooming in on the images in order to make the jitter readily visible.

The LRO camera also has a very fast readout rate. This presents unique problems since reading out a CCD sensor at extremely high speeds introduces noise and can result in "charge traps" were the CCD sensor's pixel array was not fully flushed and cleared before shooting the next image. The associated electronics which read out the CCD sensor's data into a data buffer can also introduce electronic noise which gets put back into pixels as a latent charge even though the pixels were just read out and supposedly fully cleared of their charge. The latent charge or "charge trap" within each pixel then remains present and gets underlaid within the next imaging cycle. Close examination of the LROC images suggests that these issues have been well addressed but not entirely negated.

So, in order to Photoshop in the Apollo evidence, one would then have to go back and hand edit, pixel by pixel, pixels with adjacent and strong brightness changes and then add in the proper jitter and any expected charge trap artifacts. Most of that would "automatically" be done when overlaying any sort of faked Apollo artifacts. But this wouldn't be "automatically" done for really bright or dark areas of the faked overlay. This is why it would be necessary to hand edit the overlay in areas where there are strong and sudden contrast changes between the fake overlay and the actual image. That would take some work and time. It would be obvious if this wasn't done correctly when strongly enhancing the images using any image processing program which is capable of 16bit internal processing since strong image enhancement would reveal that the low contrast areas of any fake overlay had not been hand corrected in order to incorporate the expected jitter artifacts. Amateur astronomers who are quite advanced in the area of digital astrophotography and digital processing and enhancement of their astrophotos would readily spot any anomalies associated with using Photoshop or another image processing program to simply overlay any faked Apollo landing artifacts since the expected defects wouldn't be present in all areas of the overlaid yet faked image data.

In any event, its a shame that the LRO camera's inherent resolution is severely limited by jitter within the LRO spacecraft itself. NASA should have consulted with Navy and Electric Boat Company engineers when designing the LRO spacecraft since they are quite experienced at suppressing vibration and noise. Every machine in a submarine which produces vibration is mounted in special custom designed noise/vibration dampeners in order to make our submarines extremely quiet. It is interesting that the University of Arizona recently published an analysis of the LRO's jitter issues which affect the resolution of the LRO camera.

Perhaps NASA could produce spectacularly sharp images of specific lunar surface targets by briefly turning off all machinery except the LRO camera and using time duration integration (TDI) drift scanning techniques in order to produce truly camera diffraction limited images?

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Check out my web page of my own processed versions of Apollo mission photos: Apollo ISD Photos

You're not thinking like a conspiracist. If you're going to intercept the signal from LRO then what's stopping NASA uplinking an edited image first.


GtoP - the jitter problem, unless you've read something I've not, is not as bad as you think. They've intentionally moved the solar array mid-image to test the jitter during commissioning. During the actual mapping phase, that shouldn't be a problem.

Well, at least as far as the LRO Apollo images are concerned, the jitter problem is readily apparent in those images and even in the most recent Apollo 12 image from a few days ago. I still say that jitter is a serious problem which limits the performance of the LRO camera. Indeed, the jitter in the Apollo 12 image now appears to be mostly confined to the horizontal axis yet more intense along the horizontal axis, compared to the jitter I observe in the previous Apollo images which seems to be more symmetrically distributed about both the horizontal and vertical axes.

If they moved the solar array deployment to mid-range, then all that appears to have occurred is that the jitter has been translated to mostly the horizontal axis. This, to me, suggests that the solar array stalks (just like the ones on the Hubble's original solar array panels) are simply too flimsy. I guess nothing was learned from the problems with the Hubble's original solar array panels.

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Check out my web page of my own processed versions of Apollo mission photos: Apollo ISD Photos

I really don't know what you're talking about - can you give a specific example, illustrated.

This is another of those great claims that, even if true, falls into the "proving that something can be done provides zero evidence that it was done in a specific case" trap.

That is where I have the biggest problem with those who put forward the hoax ideas ...

Even if it could be established that every Apollo (and now LRO) photo could have been faked using Photoshop, or the 1960s equivalent, that still provides no evidence whatsoever that any of the Apollo or LRO photos are a fake.

Proving that my marriage certificate and wedding photos could have been faked does not raise any questions about the legitimacy of my marriage unless someone can also provide some evidence that my specific certificate and photos are fake.

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Dave

Anyone seen my marbles? Anyone ... ?