Bob B.
Bob the Excel Guru?
Posts: 3,072
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Post by Bob B. on Mar 16, 2007 2:12:49 GMT -4
How do you know the flag has rotated by 180 degrees? You seem to be assuming that in each photo the flag is at right angles to a line between the photographer and the flag. But you can't know that for sure. And if it isn't, your argument just disappeared. We're not trying to prove the photo is real, you're trying to prove it is fake. That places the burden of proof on you. All we have to do is show that your argument need not be the only plausible explanation. This we have done.
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Post by JayUtah on Mar 16, 2007 2:15:44 GMT -4
I'm pretty darn sure it's in the Fox moon special if you want to google video it.
The quote most often given is the one reproduced by David Percy, for which only a vague unlocatable reference is given.
O'Leary spoke to me specifically about the Fox program. He said he gave a half-hour interview to the producers during which he said several times he believes the moon landings were real. The producers elected to use only a few seconds of it out of context, in which it sounded like he had some doubts. O'Leary does not approve in the least of how the Fox producers represented him.
he's just not as blind as you people are to all the anomalies in the photos.
What evidence do you have that Brian O'Leary believes there are any anomalies in the photos? Have you spoken to him about that?
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Post by JayUtah on Mar 16, 2007 2:19:19 GMT -4
How do I know? Cause you can draw a straight horizontal line from the lander to the flag on both pictures that proves that the pictures are almost 180 degrees of each other unless the flag was moved.
LOL!!! You actually believe that would work as proof!? Don't you see that you can do that in the drawing that Bob has produced, even though the flag and LM have not moved?
Wow, you have a lot to learn about photogrammetric methods of photo analysis. No wonder you swallow Jack White's stuff hook-line-and-sinker.
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JMV
Venus
Posts: 41
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Post by JMV on Mar 16, 2007 2:25:36 GMT -4
Cygnusx1, I recreated this so called anomaly with a computer game and I only moved quarter of a circle around the house/LM. The mountain has moved 90 degrees in relation to the house and the palm tree has shifted to the other side of the house. I would like to hear your comments about this.
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Post by gillianren on Mar 16, 2007 3:37:21 GMT -4
I'm not trying to prove Apollo was a hoax just these pictures. Do you guys read what I write? I read what you wrote. However, you'd still have to explain what was wrong with the photographs better than you're doing, and the degree to which you could convince a jury doesn't necessarily correlate to the quality of your science. Still, if you only believe the photos are fake, why didn't they take real photos on the Moon? If they couldn't, why wouldn't they just admit that, given that people who know things in the relevant fields would know that?
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Post by grashtel on Mar 16, 2007 6:51:57 GMT -4
Yeah I can't explain why I see a few footprints around the rover and no tracks from the tire. It really bothers me why the tracks aren't there. Well unless you look at something other than the tiny version that Jack gives you, like say the high rez version that I pointed you to in my previous post or AS15-88-11900 which is a different view of the same scene showing the tracks quite visibly to the left of the image and them fading and disappearing as they enter the area where the astronauts have churned up the dust. You mean highly visible like they are in the lower left hand corner of AS15-88-11897, though on the right side of the picture the tracks are disappearing for some reason I wonder what could cause that? Fortunately the astronaut is panning right so we can look at the next picture in the sequence AS15-88-11898 which shows that the astronauts have been walking around and kicking up enough dust to cover the tracks. Now lets look at the next picture which is panned even more to the right AS15-88-11899 this has even less of the tracks visible and shows even more footprints, some of which are almost entirely filled in by the dust kicked up from other footprints. The next picture AS15-88-11900 shows even more footprints and even less visible tracks, and looks rather familiar. Finally continuing to follow the sequence of shots panning further to the right gets us to AS15-88-11901 which has no easily visible tracks (though if you look closely on the high rez version you can just pick some out at the very left) and is where Jack is claiming his anomaly, the cause of which should now be obvious from following the sequence of shots.
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Post by Data Cable on Mar 16, 2007 9:47:43 GMT -4
that proves that the pictures are almost 180 degrees of each other unless the flag was moved. Looking at the front of my car, "flag" on its frame left, pointing away from the car: Looking at the right side of my car, "flag" on its frame right, again pointing away from the car: (click either for a larger image) If you think I moved or turned the "flag" between these photos, Here is video (QuickTime, 9.65MB) shot as I walked from position 1 to position 2 between shots, keeping both the "flag" and car in view the entire time. Note, the edge-to-edge FOV of these photos is roughly 50°, about the angular separation between the LM and flag in the pan photos. Besides the fact that anyone who knows anything about the LM can tell that we're looking at it's right side, not it's back, in the 2nd pan (Jack's captions are reversed, the 1st pan shows the LM's front ), just look at the shadow directions. In the 1st pan, the LM's shadow "points" almost directly toward the photographer, in the 2nd, it falls to frame right.
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Post by Apollo Gnomon on Mar 16, 2007 11:41:37 GMT -4
Scattered in with the videogame analysis , Cygnusx1 mentioned the lack of tire tracks on some photos. I'd like to address this issue. JayUtah posted some pictures of footprints and tiretrack with upsun and downsun orientation, showing that ground texture can be emphasized or obscured by lighting. That's good, but the picture referred to by Cygnusx1 is not that simple. We can clearly see footprints around the rover. What we have here is a side effect of the bizzare tires used on the rover. They obliterate their own tracks in certain conditions, dusting the area like a flour sifter Here's the hirez version posted by grashtel. www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a15/AS15-88-11901HR.jpgZoom in, and look carefully at the back tire furthest away from the camera. It's hollow. We can see right through it. The tires are made of wire mesh. They load up with dust, and fling the dust high into the air creating the famous "rooster tails," as the dust can exit the mesh tires at the point of maximum momentum. There's another image in this thread somewhere (it's one of the ones on White's website that Cygnusx1 links to) that shows rover tracks. You can even see the herringbone pattern of the tread cleats. At high speed, the dust in the mesh wheels is being flung all over the place. As the rover slows, the load of dust is being dumped more slowly. Look again at the texture of the ground around the wheels in the image above. Many of the misconceptions that hoax believers have are based on a lack of information, like the fact that the tires on the rover are wire mesh cages. Instead, they expect things like the tire tracks to exacly mimick their earthly experience with things like car or bicycle tires leaving consistent tracks in the dirt.
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Post by Apollo Gnomon on Mar 16, 2007 12:15:42 GMT -4
And another thing - I haven't confirmed this by reading every word of the ALSJ (yet) but I suspect that the astronauts "portaged" the rover a few times, to turn it around at certain stops, or to get it out of a hole. Anyone else have an idea on this?
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Post by JayUtah on Mar 16, 2007 13:28:39 GMT -4
That's good, but the picture referred to by Cygnusx1 is not that simple.
I agree, and I don't mean to say that my example pictures necessarily answer his specific photographs.
I think both I and Cyngusx1 are switching haphazardly between specific points and the general case, and I want to apologize to him if he thinks I've unfairly taken him to task for changing horses. We should both clearly differentiate between points we raise in the general case and points we raise referring to some specific photograph.
Rover tracks anomalously missing from photographs fall into the category of arguments expressed generally as, In a real photograph I expect to see X; since I don't see X in this photograph, the photograph is not real. In philosophy-speak, the syllogism is of validating form. But the strength of the major premise is in question. Namely, how strong is the expectation to see X under normal circumstances? If we can show examples of real photographs that lack X (for whatever reason), the major premise is falsified.
The supposed lack of ordinary circumstances to explain the lack of X justifies turning to extraordinary ones, in Holmesian fashion. Specifically, the failure to observe rover tracks is explained by the rover not having been rolled into place for the photograph. If it wasn't rolled into place, it must therefore have been lifted. Again, expressing that kind of argument generally yields, If a condition Y cannot be explained by A, then it therefore must be explained by B. Y is the visible position of the rover. A is the proposition that it was rolled into place. B is the proposition that it was lowered into place.
Unfortunately indirect arguments of that form rely heavily on coming up with a complete set of candidate hypotheses, because if you're going to assert one of them by default on the basis that you have falsified all the others, you have the burden of proof to show that you considered all the others. And if you undertake to falsify all the other hypotheses in order to hold up yours by process of elimination, then you really have to falsify them.
Most conspiracy theories that attempt the indirect approach fail on one or both counts.
The completeness requirement is usually abrogated in one of two ways: false dichotomy, or insufficiency. The false dichotomy creates an artificial category that is simply the negation of some proposition, then wrongly considered equivalent to some specific assertion. If proposition A is The rover was rolled into place, then not-A would be The rover was not rolled into place. But that negative proposition is not equivalent to The rover was lowered into place, and that's the part most conspiracists miss. There are more propositions contained in the not-A category than the one offered.
The insufficiency abrogation is simply the elimination of a certain handful of propositions stated or implied to be complete without any argument for completeness. It can't be this, and it can't be that, and it can't be that other thing, so it must be my desired explanation. The completeness of the hypothesis set is begged, not proven.
Here, proposition A (The rover was rolled into place) is disputed on the grounds that A implies the visibility of tracks in photographs of the rover. But if we have reasons to believe that A does not always imply visibility, the burden of proof falls back on Cygnusx1.
In some cases we know the rover was backed into place because that was the best way to point its nose toward the action, where the TV camera would have the best view. In other cases we know that the astronauts physically lifted the rover -- which was quite light in lunar gravity -- to put it in a different place. We don't have to show that this was necessarily done in some specific photograph; if Cygnusx1 wants to use an indirect argument, he has the burden to eliminate those possibilities.
In some cases we can show that lighting affects whether the tracks are visible. The point is that Cyngusx1 has the responsibility to eliminate lighting as the cause for invisible rover tracks.
In some cases we can show that the resolution or cropping of the picture affects whether tracks are visible. Again, not that this necessarily explains some specific photo, but rather that Cygnusx1 has the responsibility to show that's not the case.
And in many other cases we can show that the ground we expect to have been tracked has been covered also with astronaut footprints. Cygnusx1 has the responsibility to prove that such tracking cannot have obliterated rover tracks. On this particular point he has only begged the question.
We are simply not obliged to believe that some photograph is anomalous until all possible ordinary causes have been specifically disproven, not just begged away. Nor are we obliged to consider some extraordinary explanation until the ordinary ones have been eliminated.
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Bob B.
Bob the Excel Guru?
Posts: 3,072
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Post by Bob B. on Mar 16, 2007 13:51:36 GMT -4
Looking at the front of my car, "flag" on its frame left, pointing away from the car... I was planning to get out my camera and produce the exact same demonstration that you just did. You've saved me the trouble. Thanks.
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Post by JayUtah on Mar 16, 2007 18:31:45 GMT -4
I suspect that the astronauts "portaged" the rover a few times, to turn it around at certain stops, or to get it out of a hole. Anyone else have an idea on this?
The Apollo 16 crew picked the rover up to turn it around during assembly. I remember at least one other crew turned it around that way while out on a traverse. You could drive it forward or in reverse, and it turned well. But since it weighed actually very little lunar gravity, you could just reach down and pick up one end of it and drag it around in place to point in a new direction. This was sometimes more convenient than driving it.
Incidentally when I was visiting a friend in Sicily I saw him do something similar to a Fiat Cinquecento. He was a bodybuilder and quite strong. He pulled up next to a parking place, had us all dismount, and then lifted the front and rear of the car into the place. I don't know what was funnier: him manhandling that care, or him driving it.
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Post by JayUtah on Mar 16, 2007 19:27:18 GMT -4
That's good, but the picture referred to by Cygnusx1 is not that simple.
Yes, this is the second time I've responded to this line.
Something Cygnusx1 said yesterday actually clicked with this line. What he said was that he was amazed at our lack of amazement. And what you said was that the data are not that simple.
And that's really a core concept: real investigators know they cannot possibly explain everything that is possible to observe after the fact. But by the same token, not every observation is crucial. Not every detail bears on the conclusion, so the inability to explain through evidence some observable detail does not necessarily undermine a conclusion or the confidence in it. It takes a great deal of domain understanding to be able to judge whether an unanswered observation qualifies as significant or a mere detail.
Unfortunately most conspiracy theorists lack appropriate domain understanding. I and others here know a lot about Apollo and a fair amount about photographic analysis -- two things Jack White and other conspiracy theorists can't say. But that often doesn't stop conspiracists from raising this or that irrelevant detail as some sort of smoking gun. Why aren't we amazed at the lack of rover tracks? Frankly because we've seen all the many ways in which rover tracks are not visible in photographs. We don't have to determine in each photo which combination of them applies; it's simply more likely that one or more of the many known reasons is to blame than some farfetched, unevidenced claim.
The other approach taken to raise the salience of details is the straw-man oversimplification of the expected case. Conspiracists want to reduce the collapse of a large building to a single equation, or all apparent motion in a video to a simple gravity ratio, or complex spatial relationships to a few simple lines drawn across a photograph. Having done that, and having shown that those toy, ad hoc "solutions" fail to predict their hyped-up detail, they go on to cram their conspiracy theory into the vast inductive gulf that exists, sadly, only in their minds. The real world is much more complex, much messier, and much more difficult to discover than that. If you want to understand the messiness, you have to undertake to discover the complexity that creates it. And you have to accept that there will be details at every step that remain out of reach. That's what science does.
But we can indeed make that inductive gap very narrow indeed. And we can make it narrow enough that the conspiracy theories just do not comfortably fit. In short, we don't have to know everything in order to conclude confidently that some particular idea probably isn't the right one.
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Post by cygnusx1 on Mar 16, 2007 22:02:31 GMT -4
Ok I heard your argument that since this is a panorama or series of shots this would explain why the flag appears to shift positions when the two Apollo panoramas are compared. So I went back into my 3D program (Battlefield 2) and setup a similar situation. The tank represents the lander and the tree the flag. I went in a full circle taking pictures just like in a real panorama. Then I spliced the pics together, measured out 160 degrees from 360 degrees of pictures and cut and pasted them into a new document with the Apollo 16 shot pasted in below. We can see that they match closely to the Apollo shot. Now I positioned my camera facing the right side of the lander (tank) taking care to note that the Apollo shot is slightly to the left of center as we can see by the angle of the landing gear. Notice how close the tree is now to the photographer. There is no way the flag could be even on the horizon with the lander. However the mountain does match up fairly closely with the Apollo images so in that case yes Jack was wrong to point that out in his study.
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Post by cygnusx1 on Mar 16, 2007 22:07:10 GMT -4
Interestingly I found this shot on Jack's page that contains a flag with no shadow... did special effects people paste flags into NASA's images from the moon? www.aulis.com/jackstudies_2.html
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