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Post by turbonium on Aug 4, 2005 0:51:02 GMT -4
Back on topic. So, we have the ability to see the landing sites, after all. And in 2002 there was an announced plan to find those sites with first trying one telescope, then combining them to do it if one didn't work. Since that time.....nothing has been mentioned. No follow up announcements, no notification of change in plans or inability to find the sites. Zip. I haven't received any reply to date from my inquiry, so I'll try some other avenues of contacting the ESO. Which reminds me, the Smart-1probe was to have already taken images of Apollo 11,16 and 17 landing sites but the ESA has not released them. And they had also recently spiralled down closer to the Moon surface to get better images. Again, since then it has been silence from the ESA on this project.. The below text is from an article on Mar.4, 2005. Using its ion engine, the probe has successfully spiraled down further to an altitude closer to the Moon.
Foing said that each Apollo site, where the engine blast of the two-person landing craft stirred up the landscape, could be worthwhile targets for SMART-1 imaging.
"We shall search for them, with measurements not only in black and white, but also in three colors giving some information about minerals, weathering or [rocket engine] plume disturbance," he said.
SMART-1 operators also plan sequences that keep the probe’s camera specially trained on some landing sites as it sweeps overhead, Foing said. Along with these observations and others, the spacecraft will also be busy gleaning data in preparation for future international lunar exploration missions, he emphasized.
Foing told SPACE.com that the SMART-1 orbiter circling the Moon has already covered the Apollo 11, 16, 17 landing sites, as well as spots where the former Soviet Union’s Luna 16 and Luna 20 automated vehicles plopped down. The images have not yet been released.www.space.com/missionlaunches/050304_moon_snoop.htmlThey shouldn't trumpet an end to the Moon hoax theory in headlines, if they continue to fail to live up to their promises. Below are three examples.. Clementine article April 27, 2001 Apollo 15 Landing Site Spotted in Images
"Put aside those absurd claims the Apollo Moon landings were a hoax."VLT article Nov.24, 2002 World's biggest telescope to prove Americans really walked on Moon
"Conspiracy theorists, you have a problem."www.news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/11/24/nmoon24.xmlSmart-1 article Mar.4, 2005 End of Conspiracy Theories? Spacecraft Snoops Apollo Moon SitesThese articles don't prove Apollo was a hoax, but they certainly don't help the case for proving Apollo was genuine, either.
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Post by PeterB on Aug 4, 2005 1:04:15 GMT -4
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Post by JayUtah on Aug 4, 2005 1:07:18 GMT -4
...but I do see anomalies...
Anomaly is subjective. What an airline passenger might see as an "anomalous" movement of the airplane wing might be seen as a perfectly normal flutter by an engineer or pilot. Since anomaly is a departure from the expected, a "proper" anomaly would depend on how well developed one's expectations are.
...and have asked for common explanations for them that would rule out what I perceive as anomalies. ... But the other things I see as anomalies I haven't been satisfied with by the explanations.
The unstated premise is that any unexplained anomaly taints the photo. Or stated another way, the premise is that a genuine photo should be free of unexplainable details.
That's just not the way photography works. Photo analysts can't explain everything in every photo. Certain photos of interest to conspiracy theorists are pored over -- every square millimeter of them -- for largely irrelevant details. Every detail is flaunted as some "anomaly" demanding an explanation -- "or else".
This is generally not done with mundane photographs (e.g., holiday snaps), and so the wrong impression is given that "interesting" photographs (such as the Pentagon on Sept. 11) are full of anomalies while regular photos (little Sarah on her birthday) don't have any.
At the end of the day we all know that there will remain some "anomalies" that we cannot explain. You don't get to "win" because the Apollo photos are -- in most ways -- just like any other photograph: full of things that look like ghosts, space aliens, naked women, and bare arms.
An unexplained detail does not taint a photo. What taints a photo is the positive identification of a detail that can have only some particular explanation outside of the context of the photo. For example, a car made in 1970 would taint a photo claimed to have been taken in 1963. Nebulous blobs of light don't qualify as positively identified details.
On the opposite side, I have been perplexed by those who can't see what I see as obvious anomalies.
And that's a pretty clear sign that you're doing some unconscious interpreting. No harm in that -- most everyone does just by looking. But a good photo analyst has to learn to realize when he's doing it and divorce his observation from it.
If one or two people don't see something that you believe to be obvious, that's excusable. If it seems that you're the only one who can see something, don't be so hasty to chalk it up to everyone being out of whack except for you.
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Post by gwiz on Aug 4, 2005 2:59:46 GMT -4
Anomaly is subjective. What an airline passenger might see as an "anomalous" movement of the airplane wing might be seen as a perfectly normal flutter by an engineer or pilot. Since anomaly is a departure from the expected, a "proper" anomaly would depend on how well developed one's expectations are. Er, not quite. Flutter is a phenomenon to be avoided. It leads to structural failure. "...perfectly normal manoeuvre..", perhaps.
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Post by sts60 on Aug 4, 2005 10:32:26 GMT -4
Back on topic. So, we have the ability to see the landing sites, after all.
But not in sufficient detail to identify something as an Apollo artifact without knowing what it was first. Certainly not enough detail to convince you. Pixel-sized dots won't do the trick, and there's no better resolution yet available.
And in 2002 there was an announced plan to find those sites with first trying one telescope, then combining them to do it if one didn't work. Since that time.....nothing has been mentioned. No follow up announcements, no notification of change in plans or inability to find the sites. Zip. I haven't received any reply to date from my inquiry, so I'll try some other avenues of contacting the ESO.
Yes, do please let us know who you talk to and what they say. But, as I've pointed out before, the "synthetic" telescope is still a work in progress. It hasn't yet reached the operational capability to resolve Apollo artifacts, and from what I saw it will probably be at least a couple of years.
Which reminds me, the Smart-1probe was to have already taken images of Apollo 11,16 and 17 landing sites but the ESA has not released them. And they had also recently spiralled down closer to the Moon surface to get better images. AFAIK, they're not close enough to unambiguously resolve the artifacts. I don't know what ultimate surface resolution they think they'll achieve.
Again, since then it has been silence from the ESA on this project.
Well, taking pictures of Apollo landing sites is hardly the only or most important thing they are doing. In fact, there's no scientific value in taking such pictures, though there is engineering and sentimental value.
The below text is from an article on Mar.4, 2005. <snip> They shouldn't trumpet an end to the Moon hoax theory in headlines, if they continue to fail to live up to their promises.
Bah! (Waves hand dismissively, Dogbert-style)
What headlines and slants the poplular media come up with don't really interest me. They routinely get things wrong, and that includes space.com. Now, Aviation Week or something like that would be a useful source.
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Post by JayUtah on Aug 4, 2005 11:04:23 GMT -4
Flutter is a phenomenon to be avoided. It leads to structural failure.
Or even just to simple loss of control. My point is that it arises naturally and comprehensibly out of fluid dynamics and structural dynamics. The engineer would know this. The passenger would not, and might wrongly think no airplane had ever done it and then formulate a dozen outlandish explanations based on the supposed uniqueness.
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Post by LunarOrbit on Aug 4, 2005 11:22:46 GMT -4
Thrust reversers often scare people because it sort of looks like part of the engine is falling off, and yet it is a perfectly normal function of the plane. So that is an example of how something might look "anomalous" to someone when it is in fact normal.
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Post by ottawan on Aug 4, 2005 12:08:03 GMT -4
Tell me about it LO! Happened to me the fist time I rode a 737. I didn't know about the thrust reversers. Thank God the guy sitting beside me did. His explanation kept me from freakin' too much
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Post by LunarOrbit on Aug 4, 2005 12:10:32 GMT -4
I remember you telling me about that before. In fact you were the person I was thinking about when I wrote that, but I didn't want to embarrass you.
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Post by PhantomWolf on Aug 4, 2005 13:04:59 GMT -4
naked women
Where.....?
Oh come on, everyone else is dying to know too, just they weren't brave enough to ask.
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Post by JayUtah on Aug 4, 2005 13:57:44 GMT -4
Back in the 1980s or so there was a short-lived campaign by fundamentalist religions that accused American advertisers of hiding sexually-oriented images in photographs used for advertising. It boiled down to pareidolia, of course -- people seeing breasts and other illicit organs in the patterns of light and shadow in an ice-filled glass, or in the smoke curling from a cigarette, or in tree leaves. (Remember, some of these people are the ones who see Virgin Marys in cheese sandwiches.)
We are mixing pareidolia with the generic notion of anomaly, but the connection is that what you interpret though pareidolia is not an anomaly until the identification is confirmed. You can't argue that something is anomaly because it merely looks like Karl Malden's nose. You have to provide positive proof that is -- and can only be -- Karl Malden's nose. Unfortunately that standard of proof seems alien to some: they consider "looks like" to be sufficient proof. This is why real photo analysts must become experts in the way the human mind interprets shapes, and reciprocally they must be experts in objective methods for measuring a geometric correlation.
Other potential anomalies don't necessary involve pareidolia. If you're arguing shadow direction or lighting, those aren't cases where a questionable identity is alleged. An allegedly misdirected shadow is considered in the abstract. The argument is still that it's anomalous in its direction or length or some other abstract measurement, not that it's anomalous because it's in the shape of a naked woman.
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Post by LunarOrbit on Aug 4, 2005 14:05:09 GMT -4
Disney got into some trouble a while back over "hidden images" in some of their cartoons (Little Mermaid, Lion King, Aladdin, and maybe a few others).
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Post by JayUtah on Aug 4, 2005 14:23:22 GMT -4
Here's a good example. Who is this? I daresay everyone will tell you it's Prince Charles. But because it's a caricature, the geometrical relationships are overstated. Caricature only works inside the human brain. Objective comparison fails to identify the caricature as Charles because the exaggerations exceed objective tolerances. This doesn't bother the human eye. But in photography you can't allow those tolerances. It works in cartooning, but because a caricature with sloppy tolerances is "correctly" interpreted in a cartoon by the human eye doesn't mean that the same rules apply to faithful depictions in which only an exact match is proof of identity.
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Post by JayUtah on Aug 4, 2005 14:25:24 GMT -4
Disney got into some trouble a while back over "hidden images" in some of their cartoons (Little Mermaid, Lion King, Aladdin, and maybe a few others).It depends on which claim you mean. www.snopes.com/disney/films/films.asp
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Post by margamatix on Aug 4, 2005 15:05:02 GMT -4
Not just images slip by, either (allegedly). In the film "Lion King, the lion is called Simba, the meercat is called Timon, and the warthog is called Pumbaa.
There is a certain logic in this, up to a point. "Simba" is Swahili (iirc) for Lion, and "Timon" means meercat.
Pumbaa however is Swahili for "Smegma"
I heard this when I worked on a roadshow for Disney's UK video distributor, and I can't vouch for the truth or otherwise of it. I can't find anything on the net about it either (although I haven't tried too hard......)
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