More Fodder for Lunar Landing Hoax: Earth Scale

So I sometimes read threads on the Apollo mission debunking, but I have seen so many pictures of bad lighting mistakes and reused terrain that my mind was made up on the subject long ago. I did get sucked into the current topic, Do These Manipulated Apollo Images.... On page 1 Jazzguy posted a link I hadn't seen before (www.aulis.com...) which was chock full of anomalous pictures from the Apollo missions.

I bring it up cause while perusing the library, I kept noticing how small the earth was in some, not all, of the photos. As a geology major, I know that the moon is about the size of our solid iron core (apologies to hollow earth people! ) It was bugging me, so I researched a little more. I don't recall having read anything about the earth-scale in any previous posts or outside websites, but maybe this is old news and I wasted an afternoon. If so flame me gently, I like it better like that.



The earth should look 3.66 times bigger than the moon, as viewed from the lunar surface. Granted there really is nothing to use for scale, and I suspected that maybe I was suffering from a case of Moon Illusion ... or more properly in this case, 'Earth Illusion'.

But then I stumbled onto this picture.


askmagazine.nasa.gov...

Here's a picture with a defined scale, and not a horizon that might play with my mind. So I spent like an hour scouring Google Images, and you'd be amazed how hard it is to find a comparable earthbound pic! Fortunately my hard work paid off, and I dug up this bad boy (literally, this cat is KEWL!)


macro-photography-blog.com...

Since I had to play in photoshop, I figured that I would make a finished product out of it, especially since my suspicions were correct. Fact is the earth in this pic is absolutely not the size it should be. So let's dispense with all this pesky reading and get to my visual results:



I case you can't read all the fine print, I enlarged and rotated the sax guy to a comparable scale and position to the astronaut. I marked the moon in the Sax picture with a red ring to avoid any confusion over the glow in the clouds. I was very conservative with that marking as well.
In the overlay, I erased most of the background from the sax pic, leaving the dude and the moon, with a bit of the haze around it. As I note on the pic, there was no selective scaling or adjustments to parts of either picture.

And finally, I just thought of another angle for research: In photos with the earth present, how does the light hit the earth compared to astronauts and lunar surface?

reply to post by blamethegreys


Excellent work, blamethegreys!!

Now, I have to admit that I have spent only maybe 3 hours total on studying the moon landing hoax v. real threads, so I am waiting to see what this thread brings about !!

reply to post by blamethegreys
Well...obviously, our space program utilized astronauts exactly 3.66 times larger than the average saxaphone player. Jeez.

OK, experts? The apparent size of the moon SEEMS to vary more than it should at times...at least to my foggy memory - as we merely dealing with some visual strangeness caused by the atmosphere and orbital variances, or what?

Sorry but you can't seriously be asking people to take this as genuine evidence for the moon landings being hoaxed? You...you just can't. I mean the red ring round a glowing cloud..... the giant saxophonist....i hope i'm not the only one who's seeing this..

reply to post by blamethegreys
... U know now... If U take this JUJU... 'd-ark side' of things... U lose all earthling Credit-Ability

Mr X-ULTRA/REAL-SCALE... wondering if maybe a UFO that 'mighty mouse' could pass our little 'Bio-Earth-Ship' with AJ after burners on... could be so BIG... that Gaia would just be a little bug on the windshield

reply to post by Welshy77


LOL I like the style of your response. Well, lemme see...Do I expect people to believe in my oh-so-scientific methods?

Hell no!

I slapped those pics together, didn't measure out exactly anything, it was totally 'back of the napkin' work.
But that being said, the people are just for reference, and even a 3 year old in the same photo would work for expressing scale comparative to the astronaut.

As for the red ring, meh. I could've left it out, and I'd be answering questions about the large glow though the clouds. I made sure to list the source pages for the images. Setting aside my comparison, look at those two side by side, untouched by my cursor, and judge for yourself.

The size difference you should expect is scientific and accurate. The earth is 12,000+km in diameter, the moon is 3000+km. if moon looks like 'o' from earth, the earth should look 3.66x bigger. Unless the earth is flat. Then we really need to talk to china about weighing their edge down with all those people.

ETA: Giant saxophonists are cool. Besides, that guy isn't even giant next to the moon-man.

Originally posted by CosmicWaterGate
reply to post by blamethegreys

 

... U know now... If U take this JUJU... 'd-ark side' of things... U lose all earthling Credit-Ability

Mr X-ULTRA/REAL-SCALE... wondering

if maybe a UFO that 'mighty mouse' could pass our little 'Bio-Earth-Ship' with AJ after burners on... could be so BIG... that Gaia would just be a little bug on the windshield

edit on 26-10-2011 by CosmicWaterGate because: THANX GOD... For Galactic Level

Ummm yeah.
Anyhow, I'm really not that invested in this topic. Just an anomaly I noticed this afternoon. Take from it what you will, I'm too busy communicating with 'Bio-Earth-Ship'. They keep telling me "All Your Base Are Belong To Us"...I just don't get it.

So is anyone going to refute the OP's analysis legitimately?

Or is this turning into a 'lets ridicule him in hopes no one notices he's right' type things?

I would like to see someone present some math to debunk this correctly.

The distance from the camera to the humans also needs to be taken into account.

What did you do to compensate for that difference?

Originally posted by Praetorius
reply to post by blamethegreys

 

Well...obviously, our space program utilized astronauts exactly 3.66 times larger than the average saxaphone player. Jeez.

OK, experts? The apparent size of the moon SEEMS to vary more than it should at times...at least to my foggy memory - as we merely dealing with some visual strangeness caused by the atmosphere and orbital variances, or what?

Oh man, I totally didn't account for our ginormous astronauts. Boy do I feel silly

As for you questions, the idea of atmospheric lensing is false. The moon seems larger on the horizon 'cause your mind is tricked, just like those "old hag/young lady?" pictures. With a reference point (mountain, building, etc) your mind oversizes the moon.

The orbital variance probably does play a small part, with a variance distance is ~40,000km. link
here With a maximum distance just over 400,000km, that's ~10% of the total orbital radius. I am not a image perspective genius, so I dunno if that's a full 10% size reduction at apogee.

reply to post by blamethegreys


Interesting picture. I'm not an astronomy nut, but it does seem that the earth looks too far away in this photo. Obviously the pictures we usually see from the space shuttle are from a much, much closer distance, but even with that in mind... if the earth were such a distance from the moon, we probably wouldn't see the moon from earth as well as we do now. The moon is significantly smaller than earth, but still very visible in the sky.

I thought about the type of camera lens that might be used here, but I'm not sure even that would fully explain the scale of the earth in the background. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable can pop in here and speak up. Definitely seems suspect... but again..... maybe I'm missing something important.

P.S. Here's a photo from NASA of the earth visible from the moon. Here the earth looks a lot closer than in the photo in the OP. NASA moon earth photo

Originally posted by alfa1
The distance from the camera to the humans also needs to be taken into account.

What did you do to compensate for that difference?

Absolutely nothing, but feel free to build upon my work Like I said, this was a slap-up example of what I sensed was going on in some of the moon pics. The Hasselblads the astronauts were purportedly using had no zoom, so guesstimate on that pic...I'd say 1-2m? As for the other, the angle (shooting up) would give the photographer a max of about the same distance, maybe a bit more, before being on the ground.

Originally posted by muzzleflash
So is anyone going to refute the OP's analysis legitimately?

Or is this turning into a 'lets ridicule him in hopes no one notices he's right' type things?

I would like to see someone present some math to debunk this correctly.

Me Too! I'm not afraid to learn something new. There's a billion things I don't know about photography and astronomy and light related physics!

You can't compare two random photos like that and make any kind of a determination. Now if you could prove that the photos were taken with the same camera and (most importantly) the same length of lens, you'd have a legitimate comparison. The main issue is the lens length. Longer lenses have a more narrow "angle of view" which creates an effect called "normalization". Here's a blurb off a photography web site:

A narrow angle of view means that both the relative size and distance is normalized when comparing near and far objects. This causes nearby objects to appear similar in size compared to far away objects — even if the closer object would actually appear larger in person.

So different lens lengths alter the apparent size difference between near and far objects. There are some diagrams and photo examples here:

www.cambridgeincolour.com...

reply to post by blamethegreys


It should really be quite simple.

If we see the moon, and you can use theoretical numbers here, but if we see the moon from Earth (which has an atmosphere which reduces light somewhat) and the moon appears 1inch in diameter from here in Adelaide. Given the mean diameter of the moon is 3474.20km and the mean diameter of the Earth is 12742km then from the moons surface the size of the Earth should be:

12742km divided by 3474.20km = 3.668km....so if the moon is 1 inch in diameter from our perspective on Earth WITH an Atmosphere then there is no reason to disbelieve that from the Moon the Earth should appear to be 3.668inches without an atmosphere which in that photo it clearly does not!!!

This seems to be the exact math used by the OP, no?

reply to post by SavedOne


Saved One: great call. Thanks for saving people a lot of time! The op is dealing with an apples to oranges comparison.

HOWEVER, WHAT IS REALLY INTERESTING . . . .is that the lunar shot features the earth as an "elipse" not a perfect sphere. This is interesting for a variety of reasons.

First of all, I totally believe we landed on the moon, but not going to get into that here. BUT, if the earth is distorted in that picture, and that distortion is not a function of the camera or lens, that that would suggest that there is an ATMOSPHERE, or SOMETHING in the moon's near-orbit that is distorting the view of the earth.

Take a sunset on earth for example, as the sun sets towards the ocean, it isn't a perfect circle as our view is distorted by our atmosphere . . . in this moonshot, we see a similar (albiet not as dramatic) effect. This could have a variety of implications . . . but has been discussed at-length in a book: Dark Mission by Richard Hoagland.

I like your thoughts in the OP. Not about a lunar landing hoax but the the size of the earth in the photos. It has a lot to do with a lack of atmosphere and no proper reference point. Basically an optical illusion, like when the moon sometimes looks bigger than other times.

This link might answer it better answers.yahoo.com...

reply to post by SFWatcher


I think it's more likely we're seeing a version of this: Lemmings thrown off cliffs by filmmakers! The ethics of fake wildlife documentaries.

Basically they had one shot, but wanted to spice it up by adding the earth to the background. Given virtually every image of the earth from the moon does match the scale the OP is expecting... I think it's more likely that we're just seeing someone trying to make it prettier so it would be more interesting. Annoying and something I wish wouldn't happen, sure... but a pretty simple explanation.

Edit: A fish eye effect is also a very simple explanation: Case in point...

Now imagine this effect on something of the scale of moon to earth.

Also, the shape is a sphere as best I can tell. The bow on the bottom creates a mental warping of the shape that goes away if you cover it up.

Namaste!

On Aug. 23, 1966, the world received its first view of Earth taken by a spacecraft from the vicinity of the Moon. The photo was transmitted to Earth by the Lunar Orbiter I and received at the NASA tracking station at Robledo De Chavela near Madrid, Spain. The image was taken during the spacecraft’s 16th orbit.

www.nasa.gov...

reply to post by Highlander64


Thankyou, and normality returns.