If I ran the Zoo...

[Joe Durnavich]

Any pictures at all of the stars and planets at anytime throughout all of the Apollo missions would have been a plus to disprove the hoaxer's. Why not have one camera throughout all of the missions capable of this small feat?

Here are some photos taken from the Command Module that show stars:

home.earthlink.net/~joejd/images/apollostars1.jpg

And this one shows the planet Jupiter:

home.earthlink.net/~joejd/images/apollostars2.jpg

[dwight]

Photos of planets: Each and every manned Apollo mission took photos of Earth. That is considered one planet in our Solar System. The pics were pretty unobtainable elsewhere.

Photos of stars: Many, many photos are obscured by the brightest star in the sky, and Al Bean pointed the TV camera directly at it, thus burning out the SEC tube. Can't get more in your face than that as far as stars go. And what about the eclipse featuring that same star photographed on the same mission, or the UV photos from Apollo 16. Why are photos of stars there not considered photos of stars?

[scooter]

The constellations and relative star positions don't change over the course of the year, as the Earth travels around the Sun. Why would going a mere 235,000 miles from Earth change that?
...and I do hope you don't come back with something about how constellations and star positions do change over the year...think about the Earth's orbit and inclination to the ecliptic...
Paralax is virtually non existant at interstellar distances (but it is there, at a virtually imperceptable level).

[Mr Gorsky]

If the astronauts had been aware that there would be a hoax theory raging 35+ years after the Apollo 11 landing, and taken some photos from the CSM of stars on the way to the moon in order to disprove it, it would change nothing.

Given that the stars appear in exactly the same positions in the sky whether on Earth or the Moon, BS (and others) would still make the claim that the missions never left Low Earth Orbit. In fact, in th eyes of the layman, it would possibly even reinforce his argument, since he could now claim that "the stars appear just as they do on earth, when they supposedly flew 240,000 miles away."

[Jason Thompson]

So one would think that they would have the capability to guide themselves optically, using star sightings, moon, earth and sun positions.

That's exactly what they did. Work out which way you need to point the craft using the stars, then burn the engine.

Any pictures at all of the stars and planets at anytime throughout all of the Apollo missions would have been a plus to disprove the hoaxer's.

Rubbish. They'd look just the same, so what would it prove?

Why not have one camera throughout all of the missions capable of this small feat?

Because it would serve no purpose. People who already disregard live televsion broadcasts, film and photograhs of men on the lunar surface are hardly likely to be convinced by a few pictures of stars, are they?

[sts60]

Definately would have taken some pictures of the constellations, planets, etc. What better time to have gottem them also. Six to eight days of travel to and fro. Being outside of the atmosphere.

Why? You can get better pictures of planets from Earthbound telescopes than from anything that Apollo could have carried. The same goes for constellations, which merely require a wide-angle lens and can be imaged from the ground without having to deal with the passive thermal control roll or disturbances caused by motion of the astronauts.

Also that would have been another way to disprove the hoaxers.

Why would you embark on such an enormous public undertaking, knowing you were being tracked there and back by the Soviets and other groups, bringing back hundreds of kilograms of unique lunar samples and a huge amount of still and motion imagery along with piles of other measurements, with the notion that you needed to take some pictures of stars - which are easy to fake - to prove it was "real"?

Being able to track and ascertain the exact positions of the CM/LM with the knowledge of where the constellations and planets were enroute.

You cannot determine your position from the stars and planets while in space. And, again, such images are much easier to fake than images of the lunar surface.

As the Earth and Moon revolve around the sun the views of the constellations say behind the moon if enroute to the moon would be different at different times of the years.

No. There are no discernable differences in views of the constellations over such short distances.

With the cold war going on the Apollo crafts were supposed to be able to ascertain their position and have the capability to guide themselves free of any help from NASA in the event of interferance from the Soviets. So one would think that they would have the capability to guide themselves optically, using star sightings, moon, earth and sun positions. Any pictures at all of the stars and planets at anytime throughout all of the Apollo missions would have been a plus to disprove the hoaxer's. Why not have one camera throughout all of the missions capable of this small feat?

Simply restating your mistaken notions of astrogation, and a useless type of "evidence", does not advance your argument. Nor does adding the incorrect assertion that no such cameras were taken on the missions; they were, as others have pointed out, and you could have found that out with a few minutes of Web searching.

[nomuse]

Heh. Since you can't actually get stars and lunar surface into the same picture without some trickery (okay, okay, it would be possible if you were on the night side...!) what would you have then? Uh, here's a roll of pictures of my and my friends on the Moon. And here's a picture of some stars. Whoo boy -- that's convincing.

[asdf]

Again, another complete impossiblity. There still is no way to confirm the Apollo landings on the moon by any means. 40+ some days of traveling to and from the earth and the moon and basically nothing photographed in transit?

[grashtel]

asdf said:

Again, another complete impossiblity. There still is no way to confirm the Apollo landings on the moon by any means. 40+ some days of traveling to and from the earth and the moon and basically nothing photographed in transit?

And what exactly would photographs taken in transit do anyhting to prove Apollo considering that faking them would be almost trivial to do (even if there would be massive differances from photos taken in orbit (there wouldn't be) it was be well within the technological abilities off the time to build automated cameras, such as were used on some of the later Apollo missions even).?

[JayUtah]

There still is no way to confirm the Apollo landings on the moon by any means.

No -- just by the means you've selected. And you've selected them because they're impossible. Loading the dice doesn't prove your point.

[echnaton]

Well asdf has gone away too. I guess he got tired of being flogged. Can't say as I blame him. It is tough to have your beliefs logically challenged every time you say something. And by so many people. Maybe some of what was said here made its way into his head.

[nomuse]

Actually, asdf DID miss something very convincing took in transit.

The Earth.

Do I recall correctly that the Apollo series brought back the best pictures of our Earth seen from a distance? I don't think we matched the quality of those shots for decades, if ever.

[gwiz]

nomuse said:

Actually, asdf DID miss something very convincing took in transit.

The Earth.

Do I recall correctly that the Apollo series brought back the best pictures of our Earth seen from a distance? I don't think we matched the quality of those shots for decades, if ever.

And what else was there to usefully photograph in transit? They documented the LM and the S-IVB, the EVAs on the J missions, LM checkout and other on-board scenes. Earth photography gets less useful as the planet shrinks to a small part of a frame while moon photography is only better than you can do from earth once you get close. Other astronomical targets were low priority and the science mass budget was more usefully employed in lunar investigations. After all, the upcoming Skylab missions would provide a much better opportunity for astronomy.

I can't see that they could have done much more. People who are not convinced by the existing evidence of what the astronauts actually did are not going to change their opinions for any reason.

[nomuse]

That's rather the point, isn't it?

If you were to try to collate the "if I ran the zoo" arguments of the hoax proponents, they would end up proposing things that fell in one of three classes;

1) Things that were actually done, but that the hoax believer didn't stumble across in their casual research. (And funny thing -- how suddenly less important and convincing these things become once they are revealed to actually exist).

2) Things that are actually implausible, whether through economics or basic scientific impossibility.

3) Things that could have been done, were not done, that the hoax believer can then hold up as evidence that would have finally convinced them. Except that we know how easily those goal posts can move, and given that what the hoax believers ask for in terms of iron-clad proof seem to be vastly weaker arguments then all the stuff they've already hand-waved away, it is likely that their "if only I'd been in charge" proofs would be as ludicrous.

[sts60]

Again, another complete impossiblity. There still is no way to confirm the Apollo landings on the moon by any means.

Are you being deliberately dense?

The many ways to confirm the Apollo missions, and we have laid them out in detail for an endlesss series of HBs who come on here waving their hands all excited after reading some idiot conspiracy site, thinking there's some magic proof suddenly uncovered after all these years. You are of course free to ignore these many lines of evidence, but your desire to do so does not mean they go away.

40+ some days of traveling to and from the earth and the moon and basically nothing photographed in transit?

You may also ignore the explanations of why it is impossible to determine Apollo's position by such images (other than of the Earth and the Moon), but the fact is your premise is simply wrong. In fact, you didn't even get the basic fact right - there are plenty of images taken from space:

LM and Earth from A11
Earth eclipsing Sun from A12
Lunar eclipse from A15
Earth (with lens flare) from A15
Earth during translunar coast from A16
Earth during translunar coast from A17

Of course, such images do indicate the positions of the Apollo spacecraft - unlike photographs of other planets, or of stars. And yes, there were photographs of the stars taken from at least one CM as well as by the UV telescope on A16. You're simply wrong on every single point you've made.

We shouldn't forget to mention the tracking by independent observers on Earth of the spacecraft en route to the Moon, another verification of the missions.

So you've unregistered? Might as well - you haven't bothered to learn anything, or make even a minimal effort at research.