Let me say right off that I am not a "Moon Landing Hoax" believer. I don't go out of my way to find evidence that the landing was faked. That
being said, I'd like some help understanding some discrepancies I found in one of the Apollo 11 photographs.
Most of us have seen the iconoclastic image of the earth rising above the moon's horizon taken by the Apollo 11 spacecraft on July 16, 1969. The
image is designated as
AS11-44-6552 by NASA's Johnson Space Center.
[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/27f38001c27c.jpg[/atsimg]
This view of the Earth rising over the Moon's horizon was taken from the Apollo 11 spacecraft. The lunar terrain pictured is in the area of
Smuth's Sea on the nearside. Coordinates of the center of the terrain are 85 degrees east longitude and 3 degrees north latitude.
As a child, I remember laying on the grass in my backyard staring at the moon thinking there were people up there looking down at me. I remember the
moon was full or nearly full but according to
lunar
calendars it was only waxing toward the first quarter. Funny what time can do to memories.
Anyway, I noticed the earth in the photo was about half illuminated as viewed from the moon. I figured that the moon would also appear about half
full as viewed from the earth at this same moment. Here's my reasoning: The sun must be directly above the earth (as orientated in the photo) and
therefore must also be directly above the moon. The sun is far enough away that the amount of illumination would be virtually identical on both
bodies. If the moon was full (as I remember it), that would put the earth between the sun and the moon. In this case, the earth would appear as
"new" from the moon. The opposite should also be true – a new moon as viewed from earth would show a full earth as viewed from the moon. In any
case, the moon was neither full nor half on July 16, 1969.
This conundrum got me thinking that maybe the photo was not as it appeared to be. I decided to dig into it a little bit deeper. First I enlarged the
earth portion of the photo to get a better idea of what it showed. Most of the earth is covered with clouds but there does seem to be a little piece
of landmass located in the upper left. I wanted to find out what it was. The JSC website states the center of the terrain (of the earth) is 85
degrees east and 3 degrees north.
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I loaded up Google Earth and put a pushpin place mark at those coordinates.
[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/ef1cafabe6ba.png[/atsimg]
I then cropped and enlarged the earth image, determined the center and superimposed it over a snapshot of the Google Earth image.
[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/8618ec411f6c.png[/atsimg]
Try as I might, I could not get the landmass to correlate to the part of the earth the map indicates it should be. At that general location is Syria
and Turkey (or possibly northern Saudi Arabia – see "A").
I tried to line up the weather patterns over the Himalaya Mountain range ("B") but that didn't work. And a real mystery was that the apparent
low-pressure system ("C") shows a counter-clockwise motion (as indicated by the wider bands on the left - see
this image). But a weather system located in the southern
hemisphere would circulate in a clock-wise direction (due to the
Coriolis effect).