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Post by turbonium on Jun 27, 2005 2:53:43 GMT -4
Hi all, from the newest newbie!
Question:
In the film, "A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Moon " the astronauts are doing something the producers say is faking shots to make a smaller looking Earth, as they move template cutouts around the capsule window. Jay Windley says they are " testing television equipment they hadn't had time to learn to use.". If they are testing or practising using the TV equipment then just what is involved in this test, and what , exactly, was it they were doing?
Thanks
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Post by PhantomWolf on Jun 27, 2005 6:33:37 GMT -4
Since I haven't seen the footage in question, I'll defer to others on that, however I have been following your discussion on "Unexplained Mysteries" and so figured I'd answer a few questions you have made there. (Saves me from having to join yet another forum.) You question the lack of a crater and apprently claimed there was no sign of disturbance. Well, firstly, as was mentioned, the lander was over 6 feet above the surface when the thrust was cut, however it still had an obvious effect on the surface. Have a look at this image.This image was taken by Armstrong as he waited for Buzz to move his lazy butt out of the cabin above. The bag you can see in it is called the jettison bag. It doesn't take much to see that indeed there is a lot of surface damage caused by the engine. If you look at the ground about 2/3 to 3/4 of the way from the top of the bag a line between the crosshairs, you'll see a distinctive line where the ground texture changes. This is because the area above that still has most of the lunar dust on it while the area below has been swept clear of dust and so shows the reolith below. Even this shows some signs of the engine's thrust. If you look at the dark area below the bag, you can see that the stones that were packed into this area have been blown out and rolled away. The reason that this area has been swept by the engines is that the lander was moving to the left as it come in and landed. c.f. AS11-40-5917 and AS11-40-5918 where Buzz takes images of the landing probes. Note that in the second image you can see the ground where the engine has passed and how it has the same swept looking pattern to it that the area under the lander does. So, while the engine was not close enough nor powerful enough to create a crater, it didn't leave the area directly under where it passed completely unscarred. On to the Stars. Unfortunately NASA and JPL have their own ideas on how to do things and so rarely do it exactly as we would. The Apollo missions were supposed to be scientific in nature, and so as such there was little interest in the stars. Now this might sound strange to most people, but the thing is, there isn't a whole lot of point in taking images of the stars from the moon anyways. The moon isn't really that far away from earth, and since we travel quite a large distance (in comparsion) in just going from one side of the sun to the other, and yet see little change in the stars position, the change from Earth to the Moon would be negliable from a visual point of view. Also (unlike what a lot of HB sites claim) there is very little dampening of the visible light by the atmosphere and so the stars on the moon would look very simlar to what we already see. As a result, it's of little interest to scientists and so they didn't bother with any. Well to a point. The atmosphere actually filters out a lot of light that we can't see, primarily UV. This means that in space there are wavelengths of light that we aren't able to access down here, and the Far-Ultraviolet Camera/Spectroscope experiment on Apollo 16 did just that. You see, just because a mission doesn't do what you or I think it should, doesn't mean it was fake, it just means that those in charge of it had different goals to what we expected or wanted. Now let's cover the Astronauts seeing the stars. Our eyes work in a similar way to a camera, though without a shutter as such. The aperture of our eye is the pupil and the iris adjusts the size of it automatically depending on the amount of light. If we are in a bright area, then our iris closes down, preventing lot of light getting in, while in a darkened area the iris opens allowing a lot of light to pss through. Now, the astronauts were in bright sunlight on a mildly reflective surface with highly reflective objects about them (The other astronaut's white suit, the LM, the lunar experiments and such.) This means that their pupils would be fairly closed because of the amount of light. Now as a hobbist astronomer I can tell you from personal expeience that you can't see squat when your eyes are adjusted to bright light and you walk outside at night to look at the stars. Because of this very problem, most amatuer astronomers carry red torches to read maps and allow them to make notes (red light doesn't destroy nightsight by making the iris close.) Being in an area that is extremely brightly lit (such as the surface of the moon) would still hide the stars from the astronauts because of their eyes respond to the light. You can simulate this by going to an area outside the city and away from the city lights, then standing in the carlights while they are highbeam so that you are in bright light and seeing if you can see the stars. This effect and that they weren't really there to star gaze anyways would more than explain why they don't recall seeing stars. It should be noted that the Space Shuttle astronauts have also reported that they can't see the stars if they are in full sunlight, but that out if it they can see them quite well, so this agrees with the Apollo astronuat's recollections. |
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Post by Kiwi on Jun 27, 2005 10:39:00 GMT -4
Turbonium, welcome to Apollohoax. Someone will no doubt be able to answer the query in your first post.
I don't think that PhantomWolf will mind me saying that he is a New Zealander, and so am I. We owe nothing to Nasa, and of course they have no control over what we say. We support the moonlandings because we have studied them thoroughly. I followed the entire space program right from when I saw Sputnik 1 as a kid in in 1957. I mention this because many hoax believers think that all of us on these boards have some connection with Nasa. Very few of us do.
Most people who claim the stars should have been visible in the lunar surface photos have absolutely no comprehension of the exposure differences for sunlit scenes and stars. In fact, I think many of them have seen too many movies, where the stars are always visible, but rarely ever displayed in the patterns that make up the constellations as we know them.
I was a professional photographer for over 15 years, amateur since 1968, have taught exposure, and photographed stars, so I understand a little about the complexities involved, as PhantomWolf and others here do.
That difference, 1/250 @ f11 and a bare minimum 8 seconds @ f2.8 is well over 30,000:1. Film cannot handle that difference, so it is impossible to include stars and sunlit objects in one photograph and have both correctly exposed.
A little experiment we can all do when in a dark-sky area: Sit in a brightly lit room and with one eye only, look at something bright, or the light itself, for about five minutes. Cover the other eye in some way that you can keep it open, but not allow any light in. Closing it can upset your vision with tears.
Then, keeping that one eye covered, quickly go outside to a dark area and look at the stars with both eyes. You will often find the difference is stunning. It can be so big that it is possible to feel giddy because your brain has trouble reconciling the different images in both eyes. Note that within a minute you will start to see stars with the uncovered eye that weren't visible at first, and in about four minutes both eyes will start to see exactly the same stars.
This simple experiment will go some way towards illustrating the difficulty in seeing stars when there are sunlit objects in sight. Just like with film, we can see one or the other, but not both at the same time.
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Post by LunarOrbit on Jun 27, 2005 10:41:25 GMT -4
In the film, "A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Moon " the astronauts are doing something the producers say is faking shots to make a smaller looking Earth, as they move template cutouts around the capsule window. Jay Windley says they are " testing television equipment they hadn't had time to learn to use.". If they are testing or practising using the TV equipment then just what is involved in this test, and what , exactly, was it they were doing? Thanks Welcome, turbonium. The astronauts were preparing for a broadcast that would be seen by millions of people. They were discussing what they would talk about during the broadcast and practicing the different camera settings (zooms, brightness, etc.) that they would use. It would be foolish not to prepare for something like that when the audience is so big. For the shot of the Earth they needed to block out all of the sunlight coming through the windows so that it wouldn't overwhelm the camera. "A Funny Thing Happened" only shows you about 2-3 seconds of footage from what is really a much longer discussion. I have seen the entire footage and in it the astronauts explain exactly what they are doing and why. Bart Sibrel (the producer of 'A Funny Thing Happened') does not want you to see the entire footage because it contradicts his claim. Sibrel is a con artist who is intentionally deceiving people in order to sell his videos. |
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Post by Kiwi on Jun 27, 2005 10:55:25 GMT -4
While I have the Spacecraft Films' Apollo 11 DVDs here (kindly lent to me by another Kiwi member of this board), can someone please tell me exactly where to view the footage concerned, and which part of it was shown by Sibrel.
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Bob B.
Bob the Excel Guru?
Posts: 3,072
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Post by Bob B. on Jun 27, 2005 12:21:05 GMT -4
Then, keeping that one eye covered, quickly go outside to a dark area and look at the stars with both eyes. You will often find the difference is stunning. I've had this happen to me when observing the Moon through my telescope. While I'm looking at the bright Moon with one eye, I'll sometimes put an eye patch over the other eye. When I take the eye patch off the effect is dramatic. It actually feels like I'm partially blind in the non-dark-adapted eye. |
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Post by JayUtah on Jun 27, 2005 13:53:49 GMT -4
It was not a formalized test.
The reel of film that Bart Sibrel received from NASA had a number of items on it. The first two were "unscheduled" television transmissions from the command module. It is important to distinguish scheduled and unscheduled telecasts because normally the MSFN (the global network used to connect the ground receiving stations to Mission Control) could not handle the bandwidth of television images. The additional bandwidth had to be borrowed from commercial sources and so had to be scheduled ahead of time. But the ground stations could receive television signals directly, see them on video monitors, and record them on videotape during the "down" time. Typically when the MSFN television links were activated, the ground stations would the tapes over them to Mission Control. Of course for the live telecasts the ground stations just connected the downlink directly.
The first test period was about 10 hours into the flight. The ground controllers simply wanted a picture -- any picture -- from the capsule in order to see whether the onboard systems were working. Since Mission Control couldn't see the picture, and since protocol prevented the ground stations from talking directly to the capsule, there was a sort of awkward three-way exchange going on. The picture was fuzzy and wavy, and the television technicians at the ground station had to relay suggestions to Houston for the astronauts. The Mission Control operators couldn't see the picture, and so they wanted the astronauts to sort of narrate what was going on, so that when they got the tape playback from Goldstone over the MSFN television link later, they could match up what they were seeing with what the astronauts had described.
During this transmission the astronauts had questions about exposure and other camera settings. Mission Control relayed up some suggested camera settings and then the Goldstone folks commented about how those affected the picture.
At about 30 hours into the mission there was another unscheduled telecast. This one was very short and consisted most of shots of both the interior of the capsule and some exterior shots out the window. More about this later, because this is the important telecast.
The scheduled telecast happened at 34 hours into the mission. It uses some of the same camera movements as those practiced in the GET 10h telecast, and the same settings.
There are two major problems with Bart Sibrel's interpetation of this footage.
1. Bart "quotes" from the GET 34h telecast as if it were just another "private" telecast. All the "behind-the-scenes" stuff he tries to identify in that footage was actually seen and heard by millions in the 30-minute live telecast. Because the title slug on his film says "Not for public distribution," Sibrel thought everything on it was top secret, behind-the-scenes stuff. In fact the film contained all the telecasts from the Apollo 11 command module, both the private and public telecasts.
2. The GET 30h telecast has "smoking gun" footage that shows the easily-identifiable window frame and the distant Earth moving in reference to the frame as the camera changes position. This is clear confirmation that the distant Earth image was not being created by any kind of a cutout or transparency placed over the window, and then photographed from across the capsule. The camera is only a few feet away from the window, and the Earth is clearly seen as a distant object. Bart Sibrel never shows you any of this, although we are absolutely sure it was on the reel he had.
Sibrel claims his video is the exclusive source of this footage, but that's perhaps to discourage people from trying to see the raw footage themselves. If you see the raw footage and hear the astronauts' discussion without Sibrel's interpetive "help", and you see all the footage, it's obvious what the astronauts are really doing.
If you have Mark Gray's DVDs from Apollo 11, I can tell you what specific parts of which disc correspond to Sibrel's evidence, and where to find the "smoking gun".
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Post by LunarOrbit on Jun 27, 2005 14:05:53 GMT -4
While I have the Spacecraft Films' Apollo 11 DVDs here (kindly lent to me by another Kiwi member of this board), can someone please tell me exactly where to view the footage concerned, and which part of it was shown by Sibrel. I have the original version of the Spacecraft Films Apollo 11 DVD, so it might be slightly different (as far as menus and chapters are concerned) than the version distributed by FOX. The footage that Sibrel used (a tiny part of) starts at Title 22, Chapter 5 on my DVD, and it takes place at about 34:00 GET. It shows the Earth out one of the windows for about 10 minutes and then the Capcom (Charlie Duke, I believe) requests that they turn on the lights so everyone can see the astronauts. They turn on the lights and remove some blinds from the windows. Sibrel only shows about 5 seconds of it and has his narrator speaking over most of it. |
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Post by turbonium on Jun 27, 2005 22:53:32 GMT -4
Hi again and thank you all very much for the warm welcome. You have no idea how happy I am that I'm not getting insults for asking honest questions I have about the moon landings. So now, I'd like to reply - your answers are good ones, they make things a bit more clear for me. I would like to get a hold of the unedited footage of the Sibrel clip so I can see the entire event play out. Could you specifically answer why they have these cutout templates on board the spacecraft at all? That is, they are curved templates that would not be helpful for any purpose that , let's say for example, a circle or square would be able to cover the whole window. The neglect they showed by not photographing stars in specific leaves a bad taste in that they would or could have such little regard for how important or relevant it would have been to take these photos. The reasoning that it looks very similar to viewing from Earth is kind of a weak one, imo. The PR value alone of taking a photo of the Earth amongst the stars is incredible, and would take very little extra time or effort to do. But I guess I can be OK with the rationale - to a point.. Six times they had the chance to do it at least one time, and didn't . The press conference with Armstrong, Collins and Aldrin is where I have a question still...below the Armstrong quote, is text and graphic from Eric Hufschmid's website...... :ARMSTRONG: "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." When an astronaut looks up at the stars, how could sunlight enter his eyes? If the moon’s sky is not black, what color is it? And how do you explain the vacuum of space having a color? The reflected sunlight travels in straight lines. There is no atmosphere to scatter the sunlight, so when an astronaut (or camera) looks up at the stars, how could the reflected light from the lunar surface get into his eyes?  |
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Post by turbonium on Jun 27, 2005 23:28:42 GMT -4
Hi phantomwolf - so you've been lurking on my forum, have you??  So do you have any reasonable alternative explanation for what I see in the frames from the Apollo 12 video? What else would (or could) be flesh toned, holding a metal bar, free range of movement? And the "shade people" as well, what is going on there, in your opinion? One last question, if you don't mind me bugging you? ;D Why has Spacecraft Films made a beautifully put together DVD set of Apollo 12, with video quality immensely better throughout than the very compressed online video clips (as one would hope and expect!).....except for the 30 or so seconds of footage that I first discovered the anomalous objects in the film?? If anyone of you on this forum have this set, please look for yourselves to see what I mean. I was so looking forward to the digital transfer to resolve what is in the online video. My jaw dropped to the ground as the critical footage played through. I first became edgy when, as the time approached, the producers of the DVD began to suddenly obscure the lower 1/3 of the screen with "captions". These continued all through the anomalous footage section, much to my horror. But the captions didn't change the quality of the footage. However (much worse and suspicious) at the time of the critical footage, the quality of film PLUMMETED!. In fact, it is even worse than the same clip of very compressed online video. I am now really wondering what is going on - it is, to put it bluntly, beyond any possible coincidence that the ONLY footage that is poor is right in this spot. The DVD should not be way better quality than the online video except for the anomalous section of 30 seconds!! I hope you can understand my stance regarding the moon landings after going through the comparison videos and still frames. It looks for all the world like a cover-up of this small section of film. The frame stills of the DVD are, for lack of better description, "pixelated" compared to the online video still. But ONLY in this part of the entire DVD. The rest of the DVD does not "pixelate" when stills are made. Thanks all again for your replies - I look forward to any and all points of view on these questions! |
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Post by PhantomWolf on Jun 27, 2005 23:33:45 GMT -4
Hi again and thank you all very much for the warm welcome. You have no idea how happy I am that I'm not getting insults for asking honest questions I have about the moon landings. Insulting people because they don't know something isn't fun, and usully, in my experience, it's those that refuse to listen to the answers that start throwing the insults. Here we try and just be helpful and polite. Well perhaps, afterall it might have been nice for the public, but since the photos weren't done for the public but for scientists, as far as the stars were conserned, they could have just walked outside on a dark night and taken a few snaps for the same results so it just wsn't worthwhile, from a science point of view. Spectaular yeah, but unfortunately also impossible. The Earth is a very bright object, about 8 times brighter than the full moon, whereas stars are very dim. You'd either end up with a lovely star field and a big white overexposed blob where the Earth was, or what they did get. A lovely picture of the Earth with no stars able to register on the film. For both planet and stars, we have to leave that to the Hollywood speecial effects teams, sorry. It's the same here on Earth when we take photos of the moon. In fact we had an occulation of Jupiter with the Moon a few weeks back (it's a once in 70 years happening), basically Jupiter is seen to pass behind the moon, and I took a number of photos of it. Jupiter was the second brightest object in the sky tthe time, the moon being the brightest, but it ws still hrd to capture both and I ended up washing out the lunar features by over exposing them to get Jupiter in the shot.. All the other nearby stars didn't stand a chance. Well there are items above the astronaut that can reflect the light down. The LM was larger, and there were numerous mountains that were hundreds of feet high as well. Add to that the suit helmet itself and also the sun and Earth were both in the sky which was above them. However, the major reason wasn't that extra light was entering the eye, it was that the pupil was closed due to the sunlit condition.To have allowed it to readjust they would have had to stand about looking up way from all light sources (reflective or producing) for 4-5 minutes to let their eyes adjust to the light. They didn't have that sort of time. On one of the later missions they did dim the LM and looked up through the top hatch and could see the stars once their eyes adjusted, so it was possible. As to Black, well, what we see as black is an absence of light. If something looks black on Earth it has absorbed most of the light that hits it. The sky on the moon looks black because there is little light coming from it, and not enough to trigger the retina cells in the eyes (or register on film if in a camera.) I hope that helps. Oh, and by the way, your photo of the "Zero-G" room on U. M. is actually the inside of a plane (nicknamed the vomit comet.) It allows about 30 secs of free fall weightlessness as it does a steep dive. It's not a real zero-G room on the ground. |
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Post by LunarOrbit on Jun 27, 2005 23:40:12 GMT -4
I would like to get a hold of the unedited footage of the Sibrel clip so I can see the entire event play out. Try your local library... they might have a copy of the Spacecraft Films DVD's that we mentioned. Watch it and you will realize that Bart Sibrel is withholding information that contradicts his claims. As I said, they wanted to block out the excess sunlight so that they could film the Earth. Blocking the windows completely would have also blocked the view of the Earth. Sibrel claims that the astronauts filmed the Earth from a low orbit and used cutouts to make the Earth look smaller. But if you watch the video you will notice that the Earth does not change much during the 10-15 minutes that they were filming it. If they were in low Earth orbit like Sibrel claims then the ground below them would have been moving pretty quickly. The stars would not have looked any different from the moon. We've been looking at the stars through telescopes for hundreds of years now... their mission was to explore the moon and they only had a very short amount of time to do it. Why waste time photographing something that looks the same (or better) from Earth? Keep in mind that we had far bigger telescopes on Earth than anything the astronauts could possibly have carried with them to the Moon. It would not have been possible to take a clear picture of the stars and the Earth together. The Earth is much brighter than the distant stars... in order to photograph the stars the camera would have to be set in a way that would have over-exposed the Earth, and photographing the Earth clearly would have under-exposed the stars. You can't have it both ways. Your image does not accurately depict how sunlight reflects from the lunar surface. The light would reflect in all directions, including back into the direction it came from. That means that even though the sun is behind the astronaut it would still reflect into their eyes. Besides, their eyes would have been adjusted for brightness making the stars too faint to see. |
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Post by LunarOrbit on Jun 27, 2005 23:44:49 GMT -4
It looks for all the world like a cover-up of this small section of film. The frame stills of the DVD are, for lack of better description, "pixelated" compared to the online video still. But ONLY in this part of the entire DVD. The rest of the DVD does not "pixelate" when stills are made. If "they" knew there was something in the footage that the public should not see then why would they even release the footage? Why "censor" it by pixelization when they could simply omit it from the DVD entirely? Please consider the possibiliy that the pixelization was just a result of a bad digital transfer, or a side effect of video compression. |
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Post by PhantomWolf on Jun 27, 2005 23:45:31 GMT -4
Hi phantomwolf - so you've been lurking on my forum, have you?? So do you have any reasonable alternative explanation for what I see in the frames from the Apollo 12 video? What else would (or could) be flesh toned, holding a metal bar, free range of movement? And the "shade people" as well, what is going on there, in your opinion? Well I've only seen the stills and to be honest, even with your drawings over the top I still pretty skeptical about the conculsion you drew. I haven't actually see the films myself (I'm on dial-up so downloading movies is a pain) so I can't really comment on what the images are, though from the stills the whole thing seems pretty much out of focus and distorted in both. Also I'm not a photo-analyis, though we do have a couple about the forum, one being Jay whom you already know some of his work. I'm sure he'll be happy to discuss with you which parts of Clavius you found to be funny, though Kiwi and Bob do pretty good work as well in that area (sorry if I've forgtten others.) My main areas of expertise are in Physics, Chemistry, and some biology and brain behaviours so I tend to try and stick more to those areas, though I have learnt a lot more since talking with people like Bob and Jay and spending time at the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal and other places. Sorry not to be much help in that area. |
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Post by PeterB on Jun 28, 2005 0:27:38 GMT -4
LOL @ Turbonium. Nice picture! But of course it's a fake - GWB doesn't have a helmet on! ;-)
Anyway, remember that your eyes take a finite time to react to light or dark. If you walk outside at night after being in a brightly lit room, it'll take you 10 or 20 seconds for your eyes to adjust. The astronauts on the Moon also couldn't easily lean back to get the bright ground out of their vision. If they stood in shadow, or were inside the LM, they could reduce the amount of sunlight to such an extent that they could see the stars.
Also, as far as taking photos of stars is concerned, the astronauts on Apollo 16 *did* take some photos of stars, using an ultra-violet camera. The reason for taking these photos was that UV light from space doesn't reach the surface of the Earth. So, unlike visible light, being on the Moon is very different from being on Earth.
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So do you have any reasonable alternative explanation for what I see in the frames from the Apollo 12 video? What else would (or could) be flesh toned, holding a metal bar, free range of movement? And the "shade people" as well, what is going on there, in your opinion?