The Sky Was Black On The Moon?

Originally posted by bokonon2010

Originally posted by PsykoOps
Earth glow is nothing compared to sunshine. They were there during daytime. Do you see stars on earth during daytime?

Are you Mr. Armstrong or Mr. Bean?
Have you been to the moon recently?

Have you looked at the sky recently? Wth?

[edit on 17/8/2010 by PsykoOps]

reply to post by PsykoOps


my brother woke me up because he said the sun looked purple and had a silver ring spinning around it

Dont look directly at it for long periods. Use a welders mask or something

I had a shot at explaining this a while back which seems to have been totally misinterpreted particularly in regard to the relation of atmosphere and apparent brightness of a star when viewed through atmosphere. We need to consider how large the star will actually appear without atmospheric distortion at the distances involved and it turns out that every star will be no more that a pixel of light. Sure, those pixels vary in brightness but not in size when viewed with the unaided eye or photographed through zero atmosphere. Atmospheric distortion adds a dimension of size in proportion to the brightness IE brighter stars look bigger here on earth. On the moon and in space there's no such distortion so a large star like Sirius (earthly viewpoint) will look much much smaller in size although the brightness is the same, simply compressed in comparison to what we might have expected to see based on earthly experience. The lack of obvious stars in lunar photographs is likely related to the resolution of the camera used and subsequent compression of the original image, in addition to the small aperture and high shutter speed used for photographing objects on the bright lunar surface rendering those pinpoints of light invisible.

Originally posted by bokonon2010

Originally posted by Saint Exupery
For those of you who think that stars should easily be seen from the lunar surface in daylight, I have a simple, straight-forward question:

How much brighter would stars be on the lunar surface than on the Earth's surface?

I don't need an exact number; a ballpark guess will do.

Twice as bright?
Ten times as bright?
Fifty times?
A hundred times?

Give me a rough number, please.

How old are you?

If the answer www.youtube.com... from the astronot-actor Armstrong did not satisfy you,
maybe you can ask your school teacher?

Let us know the results so we can compare them with NASA educational outreach programs.

I am 46. I have performed simple experiments and gotten my own results.

I want an answer from you, bokonon2010 - and those who feel the same way you do:

Do you think the stars on the Moon would be twice as bright?
Ten times as bright?
Fifty times?
A hundred times?

Go ahead, take a guess.

reply to post by Saint Exupery

According to NASA, your questions are at the Grades 5-8:
www.nasa.gov...
lunarscience.nasa.gov...

Can you see more stars from the Moon?

On the Moon, there is no atmosphere and no clouds to blur or block our view of the stars. The sky on the Moon is always black, even during the daytime. From the Moon, you would be able to see many more stars than you could see from Earth. You would also see the Earth in the sky, and it would appear much larger and brighter than the Moon appears to us. Earth would also go through phases, like we see the Moon do from Earth. Many astonomers think that the Moon would be a great place to have an observatory.

Compare these NASA answers for kids with the answers of Mr. Armstrong for journalists:



What answers do you like more? Tell us.

[edit on 17.8.2010 by bokonon2010]

I'm not asking what NASA says; I'm asking what you think.

Why are you reluctant to answer?

reply to post by bokonon2010


Omg... are you serious? Of course moon would be an ideal place for an observartory. During night. Apollo was there during daytime. I'm reluctant to believe that you don't understand what that means. If that is really the case then please spend some time outdoors or something.

reply to post by Saint Exupery


Considering that there is no light pollution, no athmosphere to scatter starligth etc. I think you would see more stars on the sky. However since there is no athmosphere they wouldn't appear as big as they do on earth.

Originally posted by PsykoOps
reply to post by bokonon2010

 

Omg... are you serious? Of course moon would be an ideal place for an observartory. During night. Apollo was there during daytime. I'm reluctant to believe that you don't understand what that means. If that is really the case then please spend some time outdoors or something.

Actually, the moon would be fine for an observatory during the day as long as glare from the sun and sunlit objects doesn't impinge on the optics. This is how the Far Ultraviolet Camera/Spectrometer referenced on page 21 of this thread worked. They kept it in the shadow of the LM to keep it out of the sun, and had it pointing up to keep objects in the landscape out of view. This way they were able to take exposures 10 minutes log or more (which is pretty standard for astrophotography).

What bokonon2010 stubbornly refuses to acknowledge is that there is a fundamental difference in shielded optics taking long exposures while looking upwards, and cameras & human eyes looking at a sunlit landscape. The irises on the latter are simply stopped-down to far to see stars. That's all.

Originally posted by PsykoOps
reply to post by Saint Exupery

 

Considering that there is no light pollution, no athmosphere to scatter starligth etc. I think you would see more stars on the sky. However since there is no athmosphere they wouldn't appear as big as they do on earth.

Thank you for this response. I'm not sure what you mean by the phrase "wouldn't appear as big," since even from the Earth the stars are point-sources. Do you mean not as bright? I've read some people on this board speculate that the atmosphere can "spread-out" the starlight to make it seem brighter. This isn't really true, since the amount of starlight (if we ignore apsorption & scattering) doesn't change. Spreading it out would only reduce the peak brightness of the point source. At any rate, the spreading really doesn't do much. You can see it with 100X optics, but with your eyes it's just a twinkle.

Yes observatory would work great if shielded during daytime. Since there is very little to no athmosphere on the moon that would work great. My point was that there "isn't stars visible" in the moon when you're standing in direct sunlight during the lunar day. That's the part bokonon seems to not to understand.
You're correct about the amount of star light and what I mean by big is diameter. In moon I'd suspect that stars would be much more like little dots because there is no lensing effect from athmosphere. They'd also be little bit brighter without the lensing effect scattering the light.

Blacker than Jackie Robinson's Rookie Card

The Sun was too bright and knocked all other light away.
Light being pressure or sound waves you would realize this.
Read Tesla and be smart.

The astronauts are all lying. Intentionally or unknowingly.

If those intelligent and adventurous men with inquisative minds were to find themselves on another world, they WOULD look up just as mankind has done since it's dawn, and take enough time to study the vast void of space they had just travelled.

For the astronauts to be so casual in there explanations about something like this strikes me as sinister.

Where's the passion, the awe, the overwhelming desire to communicate the best image and feeling of how it really was? Or maybe it just wasn't.

They don't seem convincing to me when doing interviews.

Stars would have been an undeniable evidence for everyone to know that the missions that landed men on the moon were genuine. Photo and movie records would have been measurable for distances and magnitude.

With an impossible task of recreating the stars, "they" chose to remove them from the equation. One blown bulb or a loose bracket in that big underground bunker-stadium would have created a smoking gun.

I think stars CAN be seen from the surface of the moon, you just have to look up, and away from the sun.

I think the reason the astronauts didn't see any is because they were about 250,000 miles away and not outdoors.

Originally posted by nerbot
Stars would have been an undeniable evidence for everyone to know that the missions that landed men on the moon were genuine. Photo and movie records would have been measurable for distances and magnitude.

You simply can not get star light to expose on film with the settings they used. (usually around 1/250 at F5.6) To ignore this you'd have to ignore the laws of physics.

You need to have an exposure time in the order of seconds or tens of seconds to get stars to appear and with that you'd need a tripod.

I think stars CAN be seen from the surface of the moon, you just have to look up, and away from the sun.

I think the reason the astronauts didn't see any is because they were about 250,000 miles away and not outdoors.

But the astronauts did see stars. They even brought star charts down to the Lunar surface. Using the star charts along with the Alignment Optical Telescope (AOT) inside the LM, they were able to confirm their location on the Moon.

nerbot, as has been stated at some length in this thread...

1. In sunlight/daylight, your eye closes down. It takes a minute or so for it to open up and adjust to darkness sufficiently to see stars, and THAT WILL ONLY HAPPEN IF IT IS PROTECTED FROM LIGHT. Have you never been to a theatre in daylight? Have you never tried to see stars while you are inside a brightly lit room? (And a brightly lit room is NOTHING like a sun-illuminated landscape.)

2. Your eye, even when you squint, is taking in light from an arc of about 180 degrees. That's because it is spherical, with a lens at the front, and light receptive sensors over a large area. ..and..

3. They were wearing helmets. They were wearing a suit that did not easily allow them to twist their heads upwards, and the risk of falling was substantially increased by such antics. But, in light of that - *do* explain how they would shield their eyes effectively. Try it with a motorcycle helmet, but imagine you are wearing an awkward suit, large white gloves and had a much larger visor area. Even the smallest light spill would spoil any attempt to open the pupils up enough.

4. The astronauts had a job to do. Every minute was costing a fortune. And they knew, unlike the armchair experts and dreamers here, that even if they did manage to shield their eyes, they would NOT (unless they could wait approximately 20 minutes with their eyes fully shielded) see the stars any brighter than they could on earth.

In other words, the astronauts are/were not stupid. Nor are/were they lying.

Indeed, nerbot, I CHALLENGE you.

QUOTE THE LIES and then explain your justification for making that claim - ADDRESSING THE POINTS ABOVE.

While you are at it, explain why you posted while blithely ignoring all of this stuff, which was covered comprehensively earlier in the thread.

Originally posted by PsykoOps
reply to post by bokonon2010

 

Omg... are you serious? Of course moon would be an ideal place for an observartory. During night. Apollo was there during daytime. I'm reluctant to believe that you don't understand what that means. If that is really the case then please spend some time outdoors or something.

Where are the words "during night" or "during daytime" in the NASA answer for the Grades 5-8? If you have a difficulty of understanding what is written there or believe that the NASA is not correct, please write to NASA and let us know the results. However, it maybe more useful to you to start with the Grades K-4 :www.nasa.gov...

reply to post by nerbot

Stars would have been an undeniable evidence for everyone to know that the missions that landed men on the moon were genuine. Photo and movie records would have been measurable for distances and magnitude.

Jeez, Nerbot. They probably thought that the video footage of actually being on the Moon was 'undeniable evidence.'

Little did they ever imagine...

Originally posted by CHRLZ
QUOTE THE LIES and then explain your justification for making that claim - ADDRESSING THE POINTS ABOVE.

While you are at it, explain why you posted while blithely ignoring all of this stuff, which was covered comprehensively earlier in the thread.

The astronots eyewitnesses have been presented to you in the posts:
www.abovetopsecret.com...
www.abovetopsecret.com...
www.abovetopsecret.com...
Deal with it.

Try to explain apparent contradictions and inconsistencies there.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

en.metapedia.org...

Visibility of stars from the Lunar Module

103:12:44 [Neil] Armstrong (Apollo 11): "I'd say the colour of the local surface is very comparable to that we observed from orbit at this Sun angle—about 10° Sun angle, or that nature."

103:22:30 Armstrong: "From the surface, we could not see any stars out the window; but out my overhead hatch (means the overhead rendezvous window), I'm looking at the Earth. It's big and bright and beautiful."[1]

vs

[Alan] Bean, from the [Apollo 12] 1969 Technical Debrief—"Star (and) Earth visibility was interesting. We could always see stars at the upper rendezvous window."[1] The Sun is currently 5.5° above the eastern horizon.[1] With the Sun 10° above the horizon, stars should have been visible out the Apollo 11 overhead window too.[1]

Visibility of stars from the lunar surface

[Neil] Armstrong (Apollo 11): "We were never able to see stars from the lunar surface or on the daylight side of the Moon by eye without looking through the optics."

[Michael] Collins (Command Module pilot): "I don't remember seeing any."[1](1:06:00–1:06:19) (Collins' remark is misattributed to [Edwin] Aldrin in the transcript.[1] In his book "Liftoff", Collins writes "My God, the stars are everywhere, even below me. They are somewhat brighter than on Earth")[1](p. 33)[1]

Alan Bean (Apollo 12): "Oh so carefully, I removed my silver pin, took one last look at it, and gave it my strongest underarm toss out towards Surveyor. I can still remember how it flashed in the bright sunlight then disappeared in the distance. It was the only star I ever saw up in the black sky, the sunlight was just too bright on the Moon's surface to see any of the others."[1]

Stars are not readily seen in the daylight lunar sky by either the human eye or a camera because of the brightness of the sunlight surface.[1]

vs

103:22:54 Duke: "...Gene Cernan says that, while standing in the shadow of the Apollo 17 [Lunar Module] (LM), he could see some stars while he was outside."[1] (Correction on the star visibility issue from the Moon is introduced later.) Astronauts' reminiscences contradict the descriptions of the star sky observed by Soviet cosmonauts (Leonov, Lebedev, Savinykh) on the dayside of the orbit; light from the Earth (Earth albedo 0.367, Moon albedo 0.12) did not hamper them see the stars.[1] For example, Leonov says that "the brightest of the stars can be recognised when they are farther than 30° away from the daylight luminary [the Sun]".[1]

On the Moon, the sky is black—even during the day—and the stars are always visible.[1]

In fact, the Moon is about the poorest reflector in the solar system... The Moon reflects only 7% of the sunlight that falls upon it.[1]


[1] Alexander Popov "A man on the Moon? What evidence?"
www.manonmoon.ru...

[edit on 19.8.2010 by bokonon2010]

reply to post by bokonon2010

[Michael] Collins (Command Module pilot): "I don't remember seeing any."[1](1:06:00–1:06:19) (Collins' remark is misattributed to [Edwin] Aldrin in the transcript.[1] In his book "Liftoff", Collins writes "My God, the stars are everywhere, even below me. They are somewhat brighter than on Earth")[1](p. 33)[1]

Except this paragraph, I do not see any contradictions or inconsistencies.