More Fodder for Lunar Landing Hoax: Earth Scale

reply to post by SFWatcher


Until your post I haven't thought about the earth appearing as an ellipse. The first thing that comes to mind is an illusion due to the partial lighting of the earth and it's atmosphere against a black background. I wonder, is there a picture showing a "full earth" (for lack of a better term) from the moon? It may appear more circular.

Nice work on that pic.

Maybe you should send it to that aulis site.

There are so many anomalies in the pics posted there it is pretty interesting.


I bet NASA wishes they had adobe back then.

reply to post by underdogradio


Good point underdogradio, I think the effect is slight in that photo but definitely noticable if you look at the curvature of the upper-left area of earth. There are a few books (the best is the one I referenced in the previous post) that point to this.

IMHO, there are a variety of implications of the elipse factor -- aside from the atmospheric ones . . .but I think it is very interesting nonetheless. There are other moon shots where we see this issue arise, but i'm not a scientist . . .and do realize that camera lenses can play funny tricks, many unintended, especially in a place / atmosphere-or-not a quarter million miles from earth.

I just think the distorted earth in some of the "earthrise" shots are incredible and really make me think.

reply to post by blamethegreys


Interesting post and nice photoshop work...star and flagged.

Originally posted by Highlander64

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...

That is some wild perspective shift there from the OP photo and the one you are showing!

The perspective in that photo makes it seem like Earth would be massive in the backdrop, rather than small. Very interesting.

I do admit this could be a lens issue combined with illusions of perspective. I would like to learn more though because this is really cool.

This is something I'm going to look into further, as I've never heard the Earth-size referenced before in analysis.

My personal opinion from all I don't know with any certainty, is that we landed on the moon, showed nothing back on Earth, and then staged what was shown to the public. To me, that possibility is even more tantalizing than "we never went", because it then means there is *something* to hide (other than simply, 'it didn't happen')

Originally posted by LightAssassin
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?

Exactly, and very well done might I add. The camera lense to the subject/man is not relevant to the distance of the camera to the earth. That will not change that dramatically with ANY lense including fisheye. So making the comparison that the astronaut is different in distance to the cameraas to the sax player/camera means nothing, it is the camera and the distance and size of the moon to earth and vice versa. Earth should be 3 times bigger in the moon landing photo's. Fact.

reply to post by muzzleflash



yes I chose this photo because it was not taken from an 'apollo' mission, and is dated prior to apollo missions

there are others you can find in Google images but I think this one does the trick

- here's another one in colour, but I cant vouch for it's authenticity



source
www.windows2universe.org...

and one that shows distance and relative sizes ..

...

Originally posted by daddio
Earth should be 3 times bigger in the moon landing photo's. Fact.

Hmmm...
upload.wikimedia.org...
www.techdigest.tv...
www.billmajoros.com...
etc.

Namaste

reply to post by ErgoTheConfusion


Thankyou for those examples, I had no idea, and this does help explain why the moon would appear smaller in that photo.

This perspective seems about right...

NASA photograph of the earth shot by Apollo VIII astronaut William Anders on December 24, 1968


But this one shot from Apollo 8 looks peculiar to me.



Wouldn't the moon look about the same size from just outside the Earth's atmosphere? How far were they away?

When you zoom in, the Earth appears to give off a glow around the lit side. I think back to that clip from Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Moon with the terminator cut-out over the round window scene, it seems that is what we're seeing here.

reply to post by LightAssassin


/nod

I'm actually a little sad because when I first read the thread... it did give me an intrigued pause for a moment.

If there were reference points large enough to see from earth to the moon, the scale would look correct. The only reason the illusion is so effective here is because there is so much solid color between the two objects. Thus we lose all sense of perspective. Kinda like in the photo with the two bottles, the carpet actually loses the ability to be a useful reference point because it just turns into solid tan. However the other things help lock everything into place so they look "right" when we look at them despite the ability to have one stay the same size and the other changing.

Namaste!

Is the angular diameter of the Earth, when viewed from the Moon, 4x larger than the angular diameter of the Moon when viewed from Earth?
Yes. The Moon appears to be 1/2 degree, the Earth appears to be 2 degrees.

hmmmm.....

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.

(i didnt get past this part of the thread, sorry )

Can i ask a question?

Why does the moon some nights look larger, yet on other nights it is tiny?
I'm dead serious, here in the southern areas of the globe it happens. When i notice it again i'll take a photo.

The other thing which might be of a little assistance, as light is refracted in our atmosphere, doesnt it defuse making it LOOK larger than it actually is? (im not too sure on this one, hence why its a question), if so then you have to factor that into your equasions with the moon, since it HAS no atmosphere.

Food for thought?
If not, please cite your research so i can have a read, and im not saying what i have said as FACT, because i have not properly considered.

Thanks to all for the responses. I really don't know that much about photography equipment, and find myself trying to crash-course just to keep up with my thread!
I am just glad that my observations gave pause, and that folks were open to the hypothesis, even for a brief moment. That's all one can hope for when throwing something this vague against the wall.

So to try and put some more data on the table, I went after the camera details. Sadly the sax player photo, no dice. It came from here originally Macro Photography Blog, but contains no image data.
The Hasselblads however are historical record. The photo I used is from Apollo 17, and has the crosshairs from the Reseau Plate. According to the Lunar & Planetary Institute:

Three 70-millimeter Hasselblad data cameras were carried by the astronauts on the lunar surface. Two cameras (LM2) were equipped with 60-millimeter focal length lenses; the other had a high-resolution 500-millimeter lens (LM1). These cameras were battery powered, semiautomatic, and, for most operations, attached to the astronauts' pressure suits at chest height. The astronauts could initiate the operation sequence by squeezing a trigger mounted on the camera handle, and the cameras were operable at check stops at each half-stop value. A reseau grid was installed in front of the image plane to provide photogrammetric data, and the cameras were accurately calibrated.

www.lpi.usra.edu...

We also know the aperture (F8) and speed (1/125) from the calibration chart for that specific roll.

So maybe the next step would be to find or produce a picture of the moon using a matching setup, and rework the comparison.

Another interesting note on the topic I just found: NASA did not release any photos of the earth until Apollo 17. Apparently an activist began a button campaign for pics of the whole earth in 1966, and finally in 1972 NASA released some. Odd. You'd think that would be a crowning achievement, bringing the world the first photographs of Earth as a whole.
www.nasm.si.edu...

Erm, this a nonsense argument and detracts from genuine anomolies. Has anyone ever heard of a "lens". These things, depending on the focal length, can have an enormous effect of relative sizes in images.

A long focal length, picture taken from distance will show an astronauts head smaller than the earth. A short focal length, picture taken close will have an astronauts head larger than the earth.

Same earth, same astronaut, different photo conditions.......DUH!

Originally posted by SavedOne
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...

Exaclty! go and take a photo of the moon with your mobile phone camera and you will see how small it looks

NOW ....HOLD ON A MINUTE..
did no one read the op's bit about the sun angle in that first pic?
go back and see this....that angle is wrong by 10 degrees or more

That always tingled my spider senses too!
I agree, it should be 3 times bigger.
Anyone ever notice that you never see continents on the earth in those space pics.
Only ever ocean and cloud (blue and white)

Just an observation!