When I zoomed in on the C on the ground, it didn't look like a C at all.Right. It only looks like a "C" in small-scale photos, typically those in which there has been some contrast contraction and clamping. In the larger photo, the bottom part of the "C" is the shadow of a clump that has been displaced by the LRV wheel and possibly also by astronaut footsteps. The upper portion is an inverted "V" shaped feature that appears to be simply a discoloration. It is not even a continuous feature when enlarged.
Further, no version anywhere of AS16-107-17445 (the photo taken prior to the "C" rock photo, of the same area) has the "C" on the rock. The notion that the "C" on the ground was meant to correlate to the "C" on the rock simply fails when you realize there was no "C" on the rock.
The "C" on the ground is a feature
in the regolith. This can be clearly seen. How this is supposed to function as a set-dressing location therefore escapes me. Others have proposed that set-dressers place little cards on the set where certain dressings are supposed to be placed, and that this "C" reflects that practice. First, there's no little card -- the mark is "drawn" in the regolith itself. Why would a set-dresser do something so blatantly ephemeral? Second, that's not how set-dressers work. Which is to say, I've been building film and theatrical sets for some 30 years and I've never seen anyone do anything so dumb.
Unless someone picks up the rock, it's a set dressing. If it's handled, it's a prop[erty].
Property masters never label stage props. The properties go on a table backstage that's marked off with contrasting tape creating little parking spots for the prop. The label goes on the table, not the prop. In my career I have labeled only one prop -- a particular sword that was meant to fall apart in a predetermined way and be reassembled for the next performance. It was specially labelled because other swords in the play resembled it, and it would wreck the performance if the actor mistakenly picked up the wrong one. It was "labelled" by having a black textured band around the pommel where the other swords had silver bands. That is, it could be identified by sight or by feel, but not in a way that revealed itself to the audience. It also had its own place in the sword rack backstage, but we felt it was important for that prop to be self-identifying.
Set designers, dressers, and property masters in film
never label anything. It limits the director's artistic freedom for closeups and different camera angles. Labeling props and prop locations so prominently in film will get you fired.
The set dresser's job is to dress the set. She'll place the dressings where she wants them, personally. If the setup must be recreated another day, or by assistants, the set dresser takes digital photos of the dressings in place, from a couple of angles. Before digital photos, they took Polaroids. That's how it
really works in the industry. Those photos become the reference for how to dress the set. The stage manager or a production assistant maintains a loose-leaf of all the set reference photos.
Some say the "C" is meant to mark the centerline of the stage. Well, in film there is no centerline, so I can't imagine how that works. In live theater there is a centerline, but you don't mark it so prominently, or with a "C". At the Empress Theater in Magna, UT (where I have just been hired as the principal scenic designer) we have an upper platform that is difficult to center oneself on visually. So there's a small strip of luminescent tape that actors use as a reference for center stage.
In drawings we often have to identify the stage centerline. That's done with the standard architectural and engineering graphic element of the alternating dash-dot line. The annotation is the elided "C" and "L". But that's only for drawings. We don't do that on the stage itself.
Now on stage and in film we do indeed mark positions on the stage. In film it's called a "mark" and it's generally done with a strip of thin tape that can be easily pulled up. Sometimes we use chalk. It's not labelled because it doesn't have to be. The actor uses that as a position reference because the camera operator already has framing and focus settings that require the actor to be in a specific place with little room for error. "Hitting one's mark" is one measure of a screen actor's skill. The mark is never in frame itself, and marks are removed when a different camera angle is set up.
In live theater they're called "spikes" and we use the same tape as the film industry. But in some theater setups the spikes can be visible to the audience. Hence at my other theater we don't use spikes; the stage crew memorizes the positions of props and set pieces with amazing precision and fidelity. And they get paid accordingly to do that. In other theaters where the audience can't see small tape marks on the stage, we mark the corners of where set pieces should go. Penn and Teller's stage, for example, is a minestrone soup of color-coded spike marks. (Magic acts have tighter tolerances for set dressing positions.)
That's the long way of telling you that the notion of the "C" rock being a sort of theatrical or cinematic production aid is pure hogwash. Conspiracy theorists don't know any more about film or theater production techniques than they do about space science.
As for the Dutch petrified wood sample, if it wasn't endorsed by NASA, then it wouldn't count as evidence toward the Hoax.It wasn't endorsed by NASA.
From what I saw, it was debunked. Siebel seemed to be using partial truths.Correct. Bart Sibrel believed that the film he had received from NASA was somehow top secret, and that he had received it by mistake. That seems to have led him to believe that he could edit it any way he wanted, to tell any story he wanted, and that no one else could get the raw footage to dispute him. Boy was he ever wrong.
It's pretty bad that he says the camera is "suddenly" revealed to be across the cabin when he simply edits out the part where they move the camera. But what's even worse is when he claims that only a "few seconds" of this footage was ever used -- in fact Sibrel's clip here is taken from the half-hour live telecast that was seen by millions. That shows the shallowness of his research. He doesn't even know what he's looking at.
...why was the 3rd party person telling the astronauts when to talk?That's the fanciful story Sibrel builds around one single garble.
At a certain place in the audio there's a garbled noise that some people think sounds like the word "talk." In fact we know what the sound is: crosstalk from the intership master circuit. If you listen to much Apollo audio, you hear things like that all the time. It's all over the place. Sibrel simply presents only the one he can wrap a hoax-theory tall tale around and leaves the rest out. If memory serves, there's even one near the famous "Houston, we've had a problem" callout from Apollo 13.
The astronauts' headsets serve both the interior MC and the air-to-ground radio loop. When you have that commonality, in electrical design, you have to put diodes in the circuit to keep traffic from one source from leaking backwards onto the other sources. But diodes, as with all electrical components, are not perfect and leak occasionally. So from time to time the astronauts' local conversations over the spacecraft intercom leak onto the air-to-ground circuit, but in a highly distorted and often unrecognizable way.
Crosstalk is common in these systems, so people like pilots and flight controllers who use this equipment a lot learn to ignore it. It's just not that big a problem.
It would be worth-while to send large, high quality satellites to orbit the Moon and take pictures.Really? Would it? How much do you think that would cost? What's our current payload-to-lunar-orbit capacity?
I'll bet that Siebel would look like an idiot when and if detailed photos of the Apollo equipment are possible.No, he'll just claim they're fake and continue making money on his hoax theory. As long as people
want to believe Sibrel, he'll have an audience no matter what rubbish he spews.
Why do astronauts sometimes appear very bright (even when they're facing away from the sun), while their shadow is solid black?If I understand you correctly, the question is about the difference between shade and shadow. Shadow is what happens when light can't reach a surface because something is in the way. Shade occurs when a portion of an object faces away from a light source and therefore doesn't receive light directly.
The shaded portion of an astronaut faces away from the sun, which means it generally faces surfaces like rocks or the lunar surface that provide secondary reflected illumination. If you imagine yourself standing on the lunar surface in a space suit looking down-sun, you'd realize that a large portion of the surrounding surface is brightly sunlit and provides light for you to see.
Look at my page here:
www.clavius.org/bibzz1.htmlThese are scenes from a shoot we did using one single light source and a space suit replica. The suit worn by the actor here is the one Cary Elwes wore as Neil Armstrong in
From the Earth to the Moon. It was made by Global Effects and uses actual Beta cloth -- the fabric used by ILC to cover the Apollo space suits. It has exactly the same optical properties as a real Apollo space suit.
If light from the surface of the Moon illuminates them, then why wouldn't the reflected light from their white suits illuminate the ground in their shadow?You mean like this?
www.clavius.org/bibzz2.html (Fig. 12)
This is one of my favorite photographs of all time. I had to overexpose it quite a bit, hence the lack of detail in the suit itself. You do get spill, but it's not likely to show up on ASA 160 Ektachrome, which has a fairly narrow dynamic range compared to the modern digital sensor I used on this photo. That means that differences in subtle darks won't come through on that film, just as what happened when I later shot the scene with Ektachrome.
Most of the Apollo photos tend toward underexposure, which means you'll lose detail in the shades and shadows. That's just simply how the photo planners wanted it.
AS17-138-21068 is overexposed, however, and shows detail in the astronaut's shadow.
www.apolloarchive.com/apg_thumbnail.php?ptr=358&imageID=AS17-138-21068A number of Apollo 16 Station 5 photos are overexposed (roll 107) and show detail in astronaut shadows.
The series AS16-106-17405 -17407 shows how adjusting the exposure settings varies the detail visible in shadows.
The overriding issue is that the side of the astronaut facing his shadow is shaded. So the path of the light is: sun to surface, to suit, and back to surface, then to camera. The lunar surface reflects about 12% of incoming light, in the highlands. The suit reflects about 80%. So light reaching the camera from the astronaut's shadow is only at best around 1% of available sunlight.
Now that's different in my photo of the astronaut-actor. The lit side of his suit faces the shaded ground, so the math works out completely differently. Light into the camera from the spill area will be on the order of 15% of the available light.
What's the deal with that guy that claims that a computer analysis of the sun in the Apollo photos revealed that it was a spotlight?Yeah, those guys love to parade around YouTube claiming their "computer analysis" proves this or that, when in fact none of them knows a darn thing about real photographic analysis. That's why you never see them anywhere outside of YouTube. Anyone can be an "expert" at YouTube.