Post by Kiwi on Aug 8, 2005 6:22:09 GMT -4
Some people really are impractical dreamers when they say this should be possible. They just don't think about it, or find out what telescopes are capable of, or do the mathematics, or look at photographs to get any real idea of what they're talking about. Do they even think about what is required to see a car on Earth from 100 km away, especially when they are not stationary but moving quickly? They're basically clueless, yet claim, as the late Bill Kaysing did, that the biggest telescopes on Earth should be able to do it.
Here's an exercise anyone can do with the Apollo 11 landing site.
1.) Go to this site:
www.boulder.swri.edu/~durda/Apollo/landing_sites.html
and save the eight photos of the Apollo 11 landing site to your hard drive.
2.) Download and save a high-res copy this picture:
AS11-37-5447
You can get one here (Apollo Image Gallery, 11-pg2, 1323kb):
www.apolloarchive.com
The third and fourth parts actually require the use of one's brains, which probably means that some hoax-believers won't be able to do it.
3.) Analyse the photographs. Study them carefully and get to know the scale in each. In all eight that zoom in on the landing site, identify the main features that you can see in the next one, and even the previous one. Don't allow them to be a just a jumble of craters. Look. See. Think. Get hold of a lunar atlas or crawl the web and identify Moltke crater, the one with the bright halo and the shallow rilles nearby.
Note that West Crater, the rocky one which Neil Armstrong manually overflew, doesn't even become visible until the fourth photo and even then it's only a tiny dot among many much bigger craters. Pick it out -- identify it.
Want to know which one is West Crater? It's the biggest one in photo No. 6, and the landing site is on the left of the box in that photo, just beyond East Crater, another that Neil overflew then later ran back and photographed. His track is marked on the eighth photograph.
4.) Okay, having done that, now identify the whereabouts of the landing site in AS-37-5447, using the set of black-and-white photos. It is just above the Command Module. Being observant, you will have noticed that this photo is rotated 90 degrees from the set of photos.
Note Moltke on the left. It is 6.5 km wide and 1310 metres deep. There could be ten lunar modules lined up side-by-side inside it and you wouldn't even see them with the naked eye from that height.
Can you see West Crater there? I doubt it. But that's taken from only about 50 km above the moon, isn't it? Yes. And even with an optical aid, Mike Collins couldn't see the LM down there, although he knew roughly where to look.
But keep using that brain and think even more, this time about camera shake. Even if from the height of AS-37-5447, with powerful optics, you could see the LM, could you get a nice, clear photograph of it?
Doesn't higher magnification also magnify camera shake or movement? Yes, indeed it does. And you wouldn't be hovering there, would you? You'd be orbiting the moon, and isn't it just a possibility that your super-duper magnification would also magnify the speed at which the lunar surface moves underneath you? Yes it is.
Is it not possible that the beautifully magnified lunar module might just turn out to be a blurred streak?
Think about it.
Oh, and by the way, it's a just wee tad harder to photograph the landing sites from Earth than it is from a mere 50km above them. But if you've carefully and pedantically followed the instructions above and done a bit of intelligent thinking, you may have actually had some sort of a "eureka" experience and may be able to appreciate that yourself.
<Fixed typos>
Here's an exercise anyone can do with the Apollo 11 landing site.
1.) Go to this site:
www.boulder.swri.edu/~durda/Apollo/landing_sites.html
and save the eight photos of the Apollo 11 landing site to your hard drive.
2.) Download and save a high-res copy this picture:
AS11-37-5447
You can get one here (Apollo Image Gallery, 11-pg2, 1323kb):
www.apolloarchive.com
The third and fourth parts actually require the use of one's brains, which probably means that some hoax-believers won't be able to do it.
3.) Analyse the photographs. Study them carefully and get to know the scale in each. In all eight that zoom in on the landing site, identify the main features that you can see in the next one, and even the previous one. Don't allow them to be a just a jumble of craters. Look. See. Think. Get hold of a lunar atlas or crawl the web and identify Moltke crater, the one with the bright halo and the shallow rilles nearby.
Note that West Crater, the rocky one which Neil Armstrong manually overflew, doesn't even become visible until the fourth photo and even then it's only a tiny dot among many much bigger craters. Pick it out -- identify it.
Want to know which one is West Crater? It's the biggest one in photo No. 6, and the landing site is on the left of the box in that photo, just beyond East Crater, another that Neil overflew then later ran back and photographed. His track is marked on the eighth photograph.
4.) Okay, having done that, now identify the whereabouts of the landing site in AS-37-5447, using the set of black-and-white photos. It is just above the Command Module. Being observant, you will have noticed that this photo is rotated 90 degrees from the set of photos.
Note Moltke on the left. It is 6.5 km wide and 1310 metres deep. There could be ten lunar modules lined up side-by-side inside it and you wouldn't even see them with the naked eye from that height.
Can you see West Crater there? I doubt it. But that's taken from only about 50 km above the moon, isn't it? Yes. And even with an optical aid, Mike Collins couldn't see the LM down there, although he knew roughly where to look.
But keep using that brain and think even more, this time about camera shake. Even if from the height of AS-37-5447, with powerful optics, you could see the LM, could you get a nice, clear photograph of it?
Doesn't higher magnification also magnify camera shake or movement? Yes, indeed it does. And you wouldn't be hovering there, would you? You'd be orbiting the moon, and isn't it just a possibility that your super-duper magnification would also magnify the speed at which the lunar surface moves underneath you? Yes it is.
Is it not possible that the beautifully magnified lunar module might just turn out to be a blurred streak?
Think about it.
Oh, and by the way, it's a just wee tad harder to photograph the landing sites from Earth than it is from a mere 50km above them. But if you've carefully and pedantically followed the instructions above and done a bit of intelligent thinking, you may have actually had some sort of a "eureka" experience and may be able to appreciate that yourself.
<Fixed typos>
