I'm not expert in this so I've been asking around. Nobody I've asked so far agrees with you. I haven't asked any real experts though.Physics is not democratic. An allegation of physical fact is either right or it's wrong, regardless of how many people believe it. Have any of those who disagree with us given you any good, scientific reason? Or did they merely express a belief? The difference between the scientifically-oriented person and the layman is that the scientist can give you a factual reason for his belief. It may still be
wrong, but at least it's objectively debatable.
I have training in photography and photographic interpretation/analysis. As an engineer I also have substantial training in the physics of light. I'll let you decide whether that qualifies me as an expert in your mind, but I am willing to discuss and debate these principles with you and answer any questions you see fit.
In my capacity as a photographer and photo analyst, I have tested and understand the various principles I and others have espoused on this topic. I have personally measured the scatter of light off surfaces. I have personally experimented with exposure settings and film chemistries that affect this type of saturation, and I understand photochemically and physically what occurs.
I'm not asking you to take my word for it that the Apollo photos aren't anomalous. I'm just asking you to accept that my belief on this topic is the product of study and experimentation, not just some wishful belief.
This Thursday I'm going to have a chance to ask a high school physics teacher.And please ask a photographer too. Not every high school physics teacher is versed in optics and photography. It takes both an understanding both of the physics of light and some practical experience with lenses and film to understand what's going on in these photos.
I've never seen any evidence that looked irrefutable.I too would balk at the use of "irrefutable", but in this debate it largely depends on what one accepts as a refutation. The rhetoric here is quite a bit more insidious than most people initially recognize.
To be honest, no proposition should ever be considered irrefutable. However it is possible to say that some propositions currently stand without a viable refutation. Thus I think it's defensible to say that some evidence is "unrefuted", but I would never say it's "irrefutable".
Your next statement gets a real toehold in the insidious rhetoric of conspiracy debate:
I've only seen things with multiple explanations. The pro-Apollo people just choose the explanation they like and ignore the other ones.It's disappointing that you feel some pro-hoax arguments have been dismissed unfairly. That generally doesn't happen here. We're not above policing each other for correctness and completeness.
I don't know what you endured at Loose Change -- I don't care to read that forum. But I can give you an idea of the categories of arguments we typically encounter, and what I feel is the best way to respond to them. Often the direct approach is not the appropriate one.
In the most optimistic cases you have proposals and counterproposals that boil down to a difference of opinion. For example, some people question the morality of allowing ex-Nazi Werher von Braun to supervise America's space program. Whether or not you believe that affects Apollo's reality isn't really important in this case. But to illustrate the point, the question of whether von Braun was a devil is one that doesn't really have an objective right answer. it depends a little on how you feel personally.
You might also include arguments such as the ones below about whether simulation equipment was used for faking, or whether it was just for simulation. The attendant facts remain largely undisputed, but the interpretation varies.
Next down the ladder are the arguments that hinge on some sort of scientific or factual allegation, such as the Van Allen belts being too intense, or shadows in photographs needing to go a certain way. David Percy is prolific at aiming those kinds of arguments at Apollo photographs. He has a set of rules he says real field photography must follow. And when Apollo photos fail to obey those rules, he dismisses the photos.
Unfortunately Percy doesn't generally prove that his rules really are rules. In fact, some his own photographs he uses as examples of some rule actually violate other rules. When addressing arguments based on some premise, it's sufficient to show that a premise doesn't hold. That is, if Percy says shadows should be parallel, and we show that they aren't parallel as a rule, then we don't have to go any further and explain in detail why some Apollo photograph looks the way it does. It's sufficient to show that Percy's rule isn't a rule, and therefore mere violation of that "rule" doesn't mark somethins as fake.
Unfortunately many people don't understand that refuting a premise invalidates the proposition that was based on it. You don't have to go beyond that and construct a separate case to prove the proposition wrong. As a matter of practice many of us do, but it's not strictly required. Yet too many conspiracy theorists think that the only valid refutation is a direct one.
Imagine a witness in court who says he saw the defendant going into the victim's house. If I introduced evidence that proved the witness himself was nowhere near the victim's house and could not therefore have seen the defendant, then the witness is repudiated. I don't have to go ahead and show the defendant had an alibi.
Near the bottom of the ladder are the counterclaims that are purely hypothetical. Here's where it gets insidious -- conspiracy theorists don't seem to be able to distinguish conjecture from fact. Or rather, they consider conjecture and fact to be equally valuable when used in explanations. The counterclaims I'm talking about are the responses to some bit of evidence that begins, "But that could have been faked by..."
Answering that kind of question typically follows one of two paths. The most natural is to take the proposal at face value and try to show why the proposed method of fakery wouldn't work. But the better way is to point out that "could have been" is not an argument: it's the suggestion of an argument. Until the argument is actually made, no one has an obligation to consider the hypothesis. In the courtroom example above, let's say the witness makes his claim to have seen the defendant at the victim's house. I stand up and wag my finger at the jury saying, "Ah, but this witness
could be lying."
Well ... yes, he
could be lying, but it's still my responsibility to prove it. Merely suggesting the possibility doesn't raise it as a credible alternative. Any time you have multiple explanations, you have to make sure all the explanations fall into the same general class of
a priori credibility. Yes, it sounds like a cop-out, but it's really the only proper response. When someone proposes a mere hypothetical possibility and expects it to be taken as a meaningful alternative without further evidence, this implies that a true explanation must be the only
possible one, not merely the one that best fits. Or in other words, the courtroom witness would have to prove it's not
possible for him to be lying, not merely that he
isn't lying.
To allow purely hypothetical propositions suggests is to accept an unrealistic burden of proof. The conspiracy rhetoric baits people into thinking they have to prove that a hoax was impossible, not merely that no hoax was undertaken or that NASA's explanation is just better than the conspiracy theory.
A lot of conspiracy rhetoric is sadly based on the notion that all arguments must be addressed by direct rebuttal even when the argument doesn't lend itself to it.
Go into some detail and give an example of something that you say is irrefutable and we can talk about it.I think the Apollo rock and soil samples qualify as unrefuted (but not irrefutable). But we can start a separate thread for that. It would be a good opportunity to investigate the purely-hypothetical modes of argument I talked about.
I've never seen any difference in the size of reflections of lights in similar-sized convex surfaces.But you have to
photograph them. And you have to do it using different kinds of cameras, focal lengths, and in different scene setups to see how each of those variables works. The lion's share of photographic interpretation is in realizing how the camera and the eye see things differently. The layman generally believes that the way the camera sees something is essentially identical to the way the human eye would see it, but that's very untrue. We're not talking about reflections; we're talking about
photographs of reflections. If you're talking about photographs, you have to understand all the elements that affect photos that aren't relevant to direct observation. That's what I and some others have tried to do.
You have the difference between vidicon and film.
You have the saturation effect. This is important. A grain on the film will be just as white if it's saturated to 101% as if it were saturated to 500%. This "clamping" effect is very important when dealing with exposure-related analysis questions.
You have the exposure effect. Different settings within the "normal" exposure window have an effect on the degree of saturation.
You have the distance and focal-length effect. Reflected rays diverge with distance, even when a zoom lens makes the distance seem unchanged.
Here is an example. This photo
was taken a few feet away from the car. Note how big the highlight appears in proportion to the size of the windshield.
Without changing the camera settings, I took this photo
from about 100 feet away. Note how much larger the highlight appears compared to the size of the windshield. Had I used a longer lens for the second shot, it would have made both the car and the highlight appear bigger. In this shot it doesn't look inappropriate because I've left in all the distance cues. Zoom lenses (such as were on the TV camera) spoof some of those distance cues.
I'm not expert so all I can do is start asking people.But again, it's not democracy. The question is not how many people believe or disbelieve; it's whether or not good, fact-supported answers come forth. It's good that you realize you're not an expert, but why are you polling other non-experts?
This video shows a Russian satellite photo of area 51; it has craters.Most laymen don't know that NASA went out into the desert and blasted scaled-down craters in the exact arragement of the Apollo 11 landing sites. But NASA has never tried to hide this; it's just one of the details that few secondary or tertiary sources feel worthy of mention. This was done so that they could fly over it in a small airplane and get a full three-dimensional simulation of what the lunar landscape would look like from above. They would fly the crews over it and have them try to identify the craters and landmarks so that when they got to the moon it would be somewhat familiar. This was a better simulation that using television cameras and small models, which was also tried.
Just because conspiracy theorists and their readers weren't previously aware of this training exercise doesn't mean they get to claim it was being kept a secret. And it certainly doesn't mean they get to invent fanciful stories about fakery and attach them to those newfound observations, especially when there are already prosaic explanations available.
These general statements don't say anything. Please go into detail.Well, we have to pick a topic on which to go into detail.
For example, the alleged off-center crosshair is easily answered -- David Percy shows you not the full frame, but merely a portion of the frame. Because his version of the photo has been cropped, the crosshair doesn't appear in the center. Easy as that. Why does it matter? Because the reader trusts that Percy has eliminated such obvious possibilities as that, but the reader has been fooled. David Percy is either dishonest or incompetent. There really isn't much else.
More detail? Sure. The Hasselblad 70mm longroll format leaves about 2 centimeters of blank film between adjacent frames. I know this because I experimented with an authentic Apollo Hasselblad, and with the Hasselblad MK70, the modern descendent of that camera. That 2 cm margin is black when the film is developed. This is reversal film, so the picture isn't in negative colors. The black sky of the typical lunar surface shot blends in with the dark margin. Without a strong light and a microscope, it's hard to tell where the black sky ends and the black margin begins.
AS11-40-5903 was a near miss. Armstrong actually chopped off the top of Aldrin's backpack in that picture. If you print or scan the frame as it is on the film, it looks way off-center. So when the picture is printed singly in books or used elsewhere, it's common to "borrow" a bit of that dark margin at the top for additional sky, and to chop off a bit of the ground at the bottom of the frame. Now that's not strictly dishonest. But the type of photographic analysis David Percy proposed to do can't be done from those secondary sources.
David Percy told me directly that his work was all done from actual contact-printed transparencies. But this particular argument is how I know he's not being completely forthright. The contact-printed transparency dupes retain the full frame and margins. So if
Dark Moon's copy of that photo came from the dupe he said he was using, then Percy himself had to have been the one to crop it the way it appeared. If so, then he manufactured the off-center fiducial anomaly himself.
But I don't think that's what happened. I think Percy, like many other conspiracy theorists, just downloaded JPEG images off the Internet from wherever he could get them and used those instead of any faithful copy he might have claimed to have. The JPEG he chose to use for this argument is one in which someon unknown person cropped the bottom and added black "headroom" at the top. Percy may not have known this, but that doesn't excuse him. He's responsible for ensuring that the copy he uses is faithful enough to make his claim true.
If Percy had indeed had a faithful copy of the original strip of film (they exist), there are many tests he could have done in order to test whether the fiducial was properly centered. For example, he could have measured the interval between the center fiducials in a sequence that included the suspect photo and determined whether they all occurred roughly every 90 millimeters. Or he could have measured up from the clearly-demarcated bottom of the frame to the center fiducial to see whether that distance was consistent with the other photos. But he did none of that -- he simply used a secondhand source without checking, all the while implying to his readers that he had used the best material.
This is only one example of many instances in which David Percy has been shoddy, sloppy, or possibly even deliberately dishonest. The average reader isn't compelled to check up on those facts, but we are. And the fact that we have checked up on it should count for something.
The question in this thread is whether the visor reflections in the photos are proper to a lunar environment. David Percy implies that they should all look the same. And if they don't, there's something wrong with the light source that produced them. Unfortunately the notion that they should all look the same is just ludicrous to any who have really studied the problem. That doesn't include most of Percy's readers, but it does include me. I won't rehash the various things Percy doesn't consider; they're all mentioned in the thread. But I have confirmed personally through experimentation that things like film formulation, exposure settings, vidicon effects, and distance combined with focal length really do have the effects I thought they did. Where can I read where David Percy validated his premise that all the reflections should photograph the same?
In many ways this web forum format is limiting. Give me 15 minutes with a whiteboard and a digital camera and I guarantee you'll understand it as well as I do.