We Probably Never Made it to the Moon

a reply to: ArMaP

Interesting, just shows the images have definitely been processed.

On another note, i was watching some ISS footage of the Earth and when it came to Europe, to me at least the scales of the landmasses didn't match the expected curvature. I've provided a quick example highlighting what i mean, very rough calculations but see what you think and if there's a simple explanation.

So, this is a screengrab i've taken from the ISS footage, i've not messed around with the dimensions or ratio's, simply overlaid the image and followed the curvature to estimate the size of the earth in comparison to the coast of Portugal.



The Portuguese coast measured 435 pixels and following the curvature we have roughly 3784 pixels for the globe, which represents 11.5% of the total diameter.

Yet, when i check the actual distance, the Portuguese coast is 471km and the polar diameter of the Earth is 12714km, which represents only 3.7% of the total diameter. As can be seen below:



I realise these calculations are very rough, however the discrepancy to me at least defies explanation, unless it's a perspective or lensing effect and the camera isn't showing the true curvature of the Earth.

You've been very respectful so far, so apologies if this is a silly observation with a simple explanation. I realise you have aspect ratio's of the video, then the compression and editing etc, however these should effect the scales of the Earth and curvature equally? I don't think perspective can explain this discrepancy away although i do plan to calculate and factor that in, however it's a much more complex calculation and best done when sober.

a reply to: Ove38

What could be deemed as one of the most iconic moments of Hasselblad in space was when the Apollo 11 mission successfully landed the Eagle on the Moon on 20 July 1969, signifying humanity's first steps off our own planet. A silver Hasselblad Data Camera (HDC) with Réseau plate, fitted with a Zeiss Biogon 60mm ƒ/5.6 lens, was chosen to document the lunar surface and attached to astronaut Armstrong's chest.

www.hasselblad.com...

The Biogon f/5.6-60 mm is a special wide-angle leng wh ich maats the stringent requirements of photogrammetric photography with regard to image quality and freedom from distortion. A 4 mm thick reseau plate with 25 etched resealJ crosses at nominal distances of 10 mm which are maintained to within 0.005 mm, is provided for the correction of this leng.

www.zeiss.com...

7 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT SHOOTING WITH A WIDE ANGLE LENS

www.diyphotography.net...

5. CORRECT PERSPECTIVE DISTORTION ON SLANTED BUILDINGS

“Converging verticals” is the phrase you often hear from camera club judges. Wide angle lenses can be great for landscape and architecture. But if vertical lines don’t appear straight up and down in the image, it can often look odd.

So, try to avoid them in your shots by shooting parallel to the scene. When you shoot, try to keep your horizon line in the centre of the frame, or you may need to some correction in post. Of course, putting the horizon line in the centre of the frame goes completely against things like the rule of thirds, so you still may want to crop, depending on the look you’re after.


6. USE MORE FOREGROUND ELEMENTS

Because wide angle lenses can distort the perspective, having items in the foreground of your shot can help to instil some sense of scale and distance. Sometimes, with a lot of foreground elements, they can help to create great leading lines, sending the viewer’s eye where you want them to look.

The camera used by the astronauts as a body cam used a type of wide angle lens, therefore they distort perspective making the shadow argument meaningless.

a reply to: BigfootNZ

Actually that's to do with the light scattering in the atmosphere, on the moon you don't have that so it's more like shining a torch on an object at night, it only illuminates what's in front of it. I think the other posters explanation of the internal flash is more believable. Light may scatter and reflect but you can see hotspots in some of the shadows which to me at least seems unlikely without an additional light source.



Small rocks wouldn't IMO account for the illumination and i'm sure they landed on a flat area.

Don't forget you are also out there exposed to cosmic rays, and micro meteors. A possibility would be if the film or part of the lens simply happened to get struck by a subatomic particle at that moment, causing it to appear to light up.

If the only parts of the film where that effect happens are ones where it appears directly above the astronaut, then a wire is the most logical explanation, but I'd be curious to pick over all the nearby footage, to make sure similar flashes aren't going off below and off to the side of them at other times.

a reply to: Grenade

There are enough photos of the moon taken outside the atmosphere to tell you that it reflects light. Light is not always reflected back in exactly the direction it came from - it is scattered by different angles of uneven surfaces. You can find plenty of images taken in a vacuum where objects not in direct sunlight are visible.

a reply to: Grenade

You can't see the entire Earth from the altitude of the ISS, you need to be another 20000 miles further out.

a reply to: ArMaP

I've done a lot of work using photoshop on images, so I can tell you that what's been done with these images. In the first one, whoever tried to process it wanted to change the brightness of the Earth in the image, but didn't want to affect the rest of the image because it would also alter the black sky. Their solution was to just draw a lasso around the Earth. There are other examples where that line has been done with a polygon selection tool and it looks really clumsy.

I knew without even looking that this was Apollo 15 because I've worked a lot on Apollo views of Earth. I also knew because of that work that this image has been public domain in a non-digital format for decades, long before any kind of digital editing was a thing. It's been used in advertisiments, it's in the Preliminary Science Report (I have a copy), movie posters, coffee table books, even on the cover of a an Elvis album. The weather patterns on it match with the satellite record.

For the second one, it needs to be remembered that this is not a still image as such, it's a frame from the 16mm footage shot inside the LM. Why have they cloned a footprint? Who knows, maybe they thought one was missing. Looking along the image there are a few discrepancies that forma a line across the frame. My suggestion here is that it's a clumsy attempt ro remove what someone thought was a digital artefact and accidentally creating a few more.

The fact is that you can see the original footage - it was released on 8mm reals for anyone to get hold of. The TV camera in the distance also broadcast when this image was made, there are Hasselblad images of the scene. The flag deployment sequence was included in a documentary released in 1969 (see about 19:30 into this:



and was included in the Spacecraft films DVD set of the mission released at the same time as the first upload of the still frame.

Edited to add:

An original copy of the image was sold at auction here:

www.barnebys.com...

and it clearly matches the modern version online. Paolo Atavissimo's excellent book also covers the same image and draws the same conclusion as I do - never assume conspiracy when cock-up more than suffices:

books.google.sk... =X&ved=2ahUKEwjRtKabjJj3AhW3_rsIHcX0B8QQ6AF6BAgdEAM#v=onepage&q=s69_40308&f=false


The third one again is just a simple matter of trying to get the colour right. the original image has been scanned and the resulting image has processed to get the colour of the Earth right. Again, the Earth in it is 'anatomically correct' - it is exactly right for when and where it was taken. Original copies of that image exist all over the place, again I have copies from the 1960s in my own collection. Even print media then had differences in colour balance depending on how it was treated for publication. NASA have also been guilty of using images out of sequence (for example in that documentary above and others that followed) where miassion footage has been used in the wrong order so that the story gets told in a more understandable way. NASA (and many others) have also used images of Earth that are inverted and given the wrong lunar location of images taken from orbit. Does this mean that everything is faked, or just that someone who wasn't an expert in what they were looking at made a mistake?

There is a huge difference between editing an image by altering the colour and light balance and meterially altering its content. The only physical alteration here was the mistaken addition of a footprint and the removal of a rock. Does that mean the entire Apollo program was faked? No. It means someone wasn't very good at digitally processing a physical medium that has been public domain for decades.

originally posted by: Ove38

originally posted by: OneBigMonkeyToo
a reply to: Ove38

The 'big picture' is composed of several images in a panorama.It's in tbe link I posted. They're even labelled for you. That is very different to your claim of it being a subsection of a larger image. The light source is the sun. Prove it isn't.

Are you just going to gish gallop through every piece of easily debunked c**p you've read or do you have any original thoughts of your own?

No, it's the other way around. The fake Hasselblad photos are just cropped out of a bigger photo. Like this

So even when you yourself post a photograph showing that it is one image in part of a series, clearly identifiying the image numbers, when your own post proves you wrong, you still claim it's cropped from a bigger picture? The person who made the original image is happy the light source is the sun:

www.luogocomune.net...-19

Tell us, where did they get that 'big photo' from? The one that shows miles of horizon and where all the shadows line up to point to a very distant light source. Images that have been publicly available for decades:

apollo.sese.asu.edu...

a reply to: ArMaP

I don't want to keep editing or adding to my original repy, so here's a separate one.

The Apollo 11 image that was crudely edited online has been public domain since 1969.

Original copies of that sell for sillly money at auction:

www.ebay.com...

www.worthpoint.com...

www.sothebys.com...

and here's a version of it in my own copy of the 1969 coffee table book and LP collection 'To the moon':

and it appears again in two other publications I own from the period:

onebigmonkey.com...
onebigmonkey.com...

They all match up with the version currently online.

My point (again) is that the digital versions of Apollo imagery are not the only versions. They have all been public domain since they were taken, and the details in them can be verified.

a reply to: Grenade

To illustrate the point I made ealier:

In a vacuum, objects not in direct sunlight clearly visible.

a reply to: OneBigMonkeyToo

But you can see the curve and follow it. It’s probably just a perspective thing due to the close range of the ISS, couldn’t wrap my head around it while drunk but makes more sense in the cold harsh sunlight this morning. Do you have any idea about the video clearly showing ISS astronaut having his wire pulled? (Not a euphemism)

In the second picture you posted the entire Earth appears to be reflected in his visor and what appears to be the ISS, didn’t you just say they’re not at a high enough altitude for this to be possible? Shouldn’t that visor be filled with a blue reflection of the portion of the Earth facing him?

originally posted by: Grenade
I realise these calculations are very rough, however the discrepancy to me at least defies explanation, unless it's a perspective or lensing effect and the camera isn't showing the true curvature of the Earth.

Besides what OneBigMonkeyToo said about the ISS being too close to see the whole of the Earth, the lens is probably also affecting the final result, as the best lens to get a photo of the Earth outside an ISS window would be a lens with a short focal distance and wide view angle. Those lens show a larger area of the target but distort the shape of the areas not close to the centre of the scene, and in a case like this they would create a more "closed" curvature than when seen with the naked eye or with a lens that gives a field of view close to our own vision.

You can see that effect on the video below, for example at 2:23, when we even see an impossible, concave curvature.
www.youtube.com...

PS: Just a small correction, what you measured was the distance from Cape Finisterre, in Galicia, northern Spain, to Cabo da Roca, near Lisbon, in Portugal.

originally posted by: Grenade
Actually that's to do with the light scattering in the atmosphere, on the moon you don't have that so it's more like shining a torch on an object at night, it only illuminates what's in front of it. I think the other posters explanation of the internal flash is more believable. Light may scatter and reflect but you can see hotspots in some of the shadows which to me at least seems unlikely without an additional light source.

As any experienced photographer can tell you, light does get reflected by the most unexpected surfaces, and a few metres of atmosphere do not make much of a difference in light scattering.
A rough surface like that of the Moon's surface would reflect a lot of light back, and in some cases the astronaut's suit would also reflect some light back to the target of the photo, if close enough.

originally posted by: bloodymarvelous
Don't forget you are also out there exposed to cosmic rays, and micro meteors. A possibility would be if the film or part of the lens simply happened to get struck by a subatomic particle at that moment, causing it to appear to light up.

It would probably look like this, on photo AS14-66-9301.



There are several cases like the above.

originally posted by: Grenade
a reply to: OneBigMonkeyToo
Do you have any idea about the video clearly showing ISS astronaut having his wire pulled? (Not a euphemism)

I assume you mean this one :

Around 18 seconds you can clearly see his pink pulling him up from his pocket. No wires there;

a reply to: MissVocalcord

Not what i'm seeing. Clearly grabbing something above and attached to his pocket.

originally posted by: OneBigMonkeyToo
I've done a lot of work using photoshop on images, so I can tell you that what's been done with these images.

I also know what was done.

Looking along the image there are a few discrepancies that forma a line across the frame. My suggestion here is that it's a clumsy attempt ro remove what someone thought was a digital artefact and accidentally creating a few more.

That's also what I think.

There is a huge difference between editing an image by altering the colour and light balance and meterially altering its content.

I never said those photos had their content altered, what I said was that if some people find it OK to change things in historical photos to make them look better I wouldn't be surprised if they fake some publicity-oriented videos on purpose.
Just that.

originally posted by: OneBigMonkeyToo
My point (again) is that the digital versions of Apollo imagery are not the only versions. They have all been public domain since they were taken, and the details in them can be verified.

I understand your point, it looks like you didn't understand mine, probably I should have been clearer about it.

What are peoples thoughts on the '3rd man on the moon' video that cooperton mentioned? There's only supposed to be 2 people on the moon and they're in shot and miles away, so whose foot is that??

americanmoon.org...

At about the 2:22 mark.

originally posted by: Grenade
In the second picture you posted the entire Earth appears to be reflected in his visor and what appears to be the ISS, didn’t you just say they’re not at a high enough altitude for this to be possible? Shouldn’t that visor be filled with a blue reflection of the portion of the Earth facing him?

How can you know if it's the entire Earth or just what the astronaut sees, surrounded by the sky? Either would look round, specially when reflected on a convex mirror-like surface like the visor.