Painted Backdrops?

[AtomicDog]

As we know, a lot of Apollo Hoax proponents insist that the Apollo EVAs were photographed on some sort of soundstage in a vacuum chamber or outdoors in the desert. They insist that the hills and mountains seen in the background of the later missions were actually painted backdrops set up to fool the eye, and this can be detected by a discontinuity between the foreground and the background.

Besides the fact that anyone espousing this theory must have never seen a photo taken on Earth, it can be easily shown that the Lunar topography is not painted scenery:


AS17-147-22505

This photo of Wessex cleft and the Sculptured Hills was taken at Mission Elapsed Time 117:47:43 by Jack Schmitt during Apollo 17's EVA-1. According to the Apollo Image Atlas, the photo was taken near the LM with the sun at an elevation of 15 degrees. As can be seen, the Sculptured Hills is deep in shadow.
www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/apollo/frame/?AS17-147-22505



AS17-140-21368

This photo of Gene Cernan at the Rover was taken approximately 46 hours later at MET 163:56:50 by Jack again during EVA-3. The Sun has risen to 36 degrees, and the shadow over the Sculptured Hills has all but disappeared.
www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/apollo/frame/?AS17-140-21368

As these two photos demonstrate, the background is certainly not 2-dimensional, and as I stated in Rodin's thread, I'm not saying that that faking the hills using 3-dimensional sculpting and careful light placement couldn't have been done, but such attention to detail contradicts the boneheaded moves that HBs accuse NASA of making in the Lunar stills as a whole.

[Kiwi]

Good post, AtomicDog. The hilly areas of the J missions are excellent for this type of thing. Similar things can be seen on Mounts Hadley and Hadley Delta, Apollo 15, and also East Massif, Apollo 17.

I've been intending to whip up a story with whole lot of photos showing the area a little to the left of the above scene, which includes Turning Point Rock and Station 6 from near the LM, from the Alsep site, from on the way toward Turning Point Rock, then looking back toward the LM, and again looking back toward the two sites from their eastern side.

This will sort of blow away any claim of cardboard backdrop or vacuum chamber. Well, at least it will for people who are realistic.

I think one reason for the "backdrop" idea is simply the nearby local horizon which is visible in your two photos and a few kilometres from the distant hills, and also the lack of perspective. Plus, HBs and HPs rarely do a proper anaysis of photos to test whether or not distant hills or mountains look exactly[/i] the same in different photos.

Edited to change last two words in second paragraph from "northern side" to "eastern side."

[dickshane]

Aug 21, 2010 9:39:26 GMT -4 Kiwi said:

I think one reason for the "backdrop" idea is simply the nearby local horizon which is visible in your two photos and a few kilometres from the distant hills, and also the lack of perspective.

Isn't it also the case that many HBs think the hills look too close and therefore mistake them for backdrops because they don't realise that the near-lack of atmosphere on the Moon means distances will not have the same paled appearance as on Earth? If I remember rightly, one HB (Duane Daman) even said this provided him with his first realisation that the photos were fake.

[drewid]

Yep. Some of the astronauts have said that it made judging distances very difficult. Aerial perspective is one of the key ways we judge distance, the eye convergence thing only really kicks in at relatively short distances.

[cos]

Aug 21, 2010 9:39:26 GMT -4 Kiwi said:

This will sort of blow away any claim of cardboard backdrop or vacuum chamber. Well, at least it will for people who are realistic.

You are forgetting about our friend Professor Colin Rourke

msp.warwick.ac.uk/~cpr/hadley.pdf

Thoroughly debunked though.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTIcyx4IjX4&feature=PlayList&p=D0B334D064328FAF&index=0&playnext=1

Shame that the Professor won't respond to GoneToPlaids analysis. Too embarressed I'd imagine.