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Post by gonetoplaid on Aug 1, 2009 17:44:09 GMT -4
Yeah, Sirius and 1st magnitude stars "should" be within the reach just above the film grain signal noise floor, especially considering that there is no atmospheric attenuation involved. Yet the Biogen camera lens had no multi-coatings to reduce lens flare since lens multi-coating technology still was nearly 10 years later. Anyway, if I do find any 1st magnitude star candidates while processing the various Apollo lunar images, I will definitely let ya'all know and I will post a photo with the star candidate circled.
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Post by gonetoplaid on Jul 31, 2009 15:35:41 GMT -4
Well, I finally figured it out. I thought that I was seeing stars in the sky in some of the Apollo 11 lunar surface pictures. These stars appear to have valid full width half max values when examined in MaxIm DL astronomical image processing software. My theory was that these were extremely faintly recorded stars since we all have heard that the night sky (stars) appear much brighter in space since there is no atmosphere to obscure the stars and make the stars look dimmer. The "stars" which I am "seeing" just above the background film grain in the processed images apparently are simply strong cosmic ray strikes onto the (at the time) undeveloped film. This makes sense since of course the Apollo spacecraft had to pass through the Van Allen belts twice while traveling to and from the moon, and since cosmic ray strikes will be much more prevalent once the Apollo spacecraft were beyond the protection of the earth's Van Allen belts. Anyway, sorry for my wild goose chase which I posted in my first post here where I was pretty sure that I was detecting stars in some of the Apollo images. Yet the cosmic ray strikes do kind of put another hole in the hoax theories. After all, who would have thunk of exposing the film to alpha particles in order to create very faint "simulated" cosmic ray strikes and tracks on the film? Soft radiation like X-rays wouldn't do it. It has to be hard radiation.
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Post by gonetoplaid on Jul 28, 2009 14:29:57 GMT -4
This article states that we landed on the moon but that the footage was faked through a technique called Front Screen Projection. It includes a number of examples. Very interesting. jayweidner.com/AlchemicalKubrickIIa.htmlHe he. Jay's web site was an interesting read. The problem with his projection theory is that it would be extraordinarily difficult to get an exact match for not only brightness and contrast, but more importantly for the exact hue and saturation of the projected image. And that is one area where Jay's theory falls flat on its face. The other area where his theory falls completely flat on its face is that close examination of the original photos shows consistently increasing blurring (depth of field) for objects which are progressively closer or further away from the lens's focus setting. Jay claims that the distant mountains are perfectly sharp. They are not quite sharp since the "far" focus setting of the Biogen lens was set for a distance closer than infinity since the depth of field at the max F/5.6 aperture and smaller apertures would make extremely distant objects such as mountains appear to be sufficiently sharp.
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Post by gonetoplaid on Jul 28, 2009 14:07:10 GMT -4
Thanks for the nice comments about my photo. My computer monitor has a horizontal resolution of 1680, so that is why I resized the distortion corrected visor image to this width. That way I can view the image in full screen mode, put my face really close to the monitor, and pan the photo up and down to simulate Aldrin looking up and down through his visor. Neah, huh?
I am working on a spreadsheet for computing the exact positions of objects in the photos based on the coordinates of of the reseau ticks and then the coordinates of an object in the image. A spreadsheet is necessary since the optics within the film scanner which ISD used has noticeable pincushion distortion. The scanner lens's distortion makes it a pain in the keester to compute the exact angular separation of star pairs which I have found in some of the AS11 photos. I will post links to photos showing stars once I am darned sure that I have identified the specific stars shown in the photos in order to prove that they really are stars.
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Post by gonetoplaid on Jul 28, 2009 2:56:22 GMT -4
It is often the case, it seems, that arguments about the Apollo record will be made by HBs that extend into other areas of technology and historical record. The HBs do not seem to notice this, so I thought we should flag them up here. The examples I can think of off the top of my head are: No starsThe lack of stars in lunar surface images is often brought up and throroughly debunked. However, I have never seen any photograph taken in space that includes properly exposed sunlit objects and stars. These include astronauts on shuttle EVAs, distant planets such as Neptune photographed by Voyager, even the sky in the Gemini 12 EVA footage remains stubbornly starless despite parts of it being filmed on the night side of Earth. Note also that thse photographs are taken by all space agencies, not just NASA. Now, if the lunar surface photos 'must' have been faked because no stars show up, what about every other picture taken by any other probe of any other object that has no stars in?... Well, I am brand new here, but very recently I have been having fun downloading and processing the Apollo 11 raw film scans from eol.jsc.nasa.gov/sseop/mrf.htm. I got started on this endeavor after looking at some of those moon landing hoax sites and seeing the outlandishly stupid conclusions and, in some cases, deliberate misinformation about what is actually visible in the high resolution original photos. Yet conspiracy nuts make sure that they "see" what they "want" to see in the photographs while not seeing what is truly shown in the photographs. Anyway, I have found several photographs which do show stars. Needless to say, the recorded star images are extraordinarily faint and are literally buried just above the grain noise within the emulsion. Yet proper image enhancement does make them visible, and more importantly the recorded stars consistently exhibit full width half max (FWHM) values of around 1.6 to 1.8 for stars recorded closer to the optical axis, and FWHM values of around 4.0 for stars recorded near the upper left or upper right corners of the image frames. I used MaxIm DL image processing software (software used by amateur astronomers and specifically created for processing astronomical images) to determine these values. Note that the Biogon 60mm F/5.6 was exclusively used for the EVA photos. This lens has less than 1% distortion (extremely good for its day), and its dominant off-axis aberration is astigmatism. Notably, this lens is noticeably free of off-axis coma. Now things get interesting. First and in order to process the ISD high res images, I had to create a custom gamma and color correction scheme for use in the freeware GIMP image processing program. It doesn't help that the scanner used by ISD to scan the original film produces noticeable horizontal red banding in all portions of the scanned film where large and very bright objects are located. You would think that ISD would have addressed this issue by either using a different brand film scanner, or that they would have at least tweaked the purchased scanner by painting all light baffles flat black or even installing additional light baffles in order to alleviate the red banding issue. On top of that, ISD didn't even bother to properly calibrate the scanner or light source since areas beyond the film emulsion show consistently green and blue, yet weak red. And furthermore, the original film has aged. The result is that the film now has taken on a distinct red cast which also has to be compensated for. Apparently this is what ISD tried to compensate for, but they did a poor job of it since they only concentrated on getting the mid tones of the moon surface to render as a generally neutral gray. The upshot is that I had to spend three days of my free time tweaking the gamma and RGB curve corrections in GIMP in order to fully compensate for these major issues: -- Improper ISD color calibration. -- The ISD scanner's red banding. -- The deterioration of the original film which has taken on a reddish cast. -- The nonlinear response of the film's silver particles within the film's individual RGB layers. This one was tricky to get right, and this alone took me two days of my free time to correct. Fortunately I was able to draw upon my over 30 years of experience as an amateur astronomer and astrophotographer to know how film of the period (late 1960's) responds in extremely low light. Yet nevertheless, even after fully color correcting the ISD images, any found stars will always have a very distinct blue hue since by nature silver grains within film always respond more to blue light compared to red light. I will soon be posting a link to a web page for my processed ISD images. Well, the upshot is that yes, stars actually are present in several of the roll 40 Apollo 11 photos, but these stars never were visible in print since for aesthetic reasons all published photos were offset to produce a black background. So, here is my teaser photo for ya'all to show my image processing skills. This photo is from image 5903 where I cropped in on Aldrin's gold visor, removed the gold visor tint, and de-spherized the reflections in Aldrin's visor in order to show what Aldrin actually saw when Armstrong shot the famous 5903 "Man On The Moon" photo: www.mem-tek.com/ISD/ISD_highres_AS11_AS11-40-5903_visor_gold-removed_rotated_large_distorted_mirrored1.jpgYes, that is the Earth above and somewhat to the right of Armstrong. Sorry, it really is impossible (regardless of what photos others have published) to discern the true phase illumination of the Earth in image 5903 since Aldrin himself is far from perfectly focused in the 5903 photo and since the gold visor surface itself was not polished anywhere close to 1/4 wavefront optical quality in order to act as a true optical quality mirror surface.
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