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Post by nomuse on Dec 16, 2011 16:41:11 GMT -4
Right. Walk into a graphic arts forum and tell people "I don't know all the fancy terms you guys use but I'm going to tell you you're going about it all wrong anyhow."
Tough. If you can't handle the technical terminology, you don't have sufficient grasp of the subject yet.
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Post by nomuse on Dec 16, 2011 15:45:40 GMT -4
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Post by nomuse on Dec 16, 2011 14:59:15 GMT -4
It is strange - I was using and teaching computer graphics in early 1970s - later also in the West (after working for NASA) - maybe US military is an old-fasioned governmental body and they did not know anything about such computer technology - but maybe they learnt from commercial products these techniques later. I told earlier that CAD rendering was not in question (your example videos were such) but possibly transformation of rasterized surfaces of the modules (of course that can be called rendering as well). This is completely different approach. It seems that there are very strong believers here because you continuously missinterpret my sayings. Or you aren't being sufficiently clear to cross the barrier between different languages and different terminologies. And I want to repeat this - when was the Apollo picture material published - not in 1969 when some fragmentary pictures and videos were shown (and very poor quality), but only during the Internet years we have seen surprisingly new materials from e.g. Apollo-11 ... and it seems that new materials are still coming out (if you follow the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal). Maybe you should go through the history of Langley and special teams working there. I have two prints given to me while the flights were going on. This was not uncommon for my generation. I will agree that the quality of the scans and translations is improving, and there is better access to the margins; to shots that were duplicates or from the end of rolls or otherwise not considered worth spending a lot of time making widely accessible. But the larger volume of the material has been available for decades, in sufficient quality to rule out simple fakery. Somebody was asking about shadows in the 3D pictures. I checked the times of mapping photography taken from Moon orbit using Metric and Panoramic cameras in Apollo-15. They are exactly the same as EVAs. This means that if you prepare a 3D model on top of Panoramic pictures where the shadows are in the moon landscape, the shadows are just correct. I also made CMY analysis of the pictures and found out that the background of the color pictures are B&W (see e.g. AS-17-145-). Over here we call that "baked in" lighting. Yes, it could be worked with. It means first off that your choices are not arbitrary; you can't simply set up whatever scene you desire. It means more subtly that you have to be quite careful matching any rendered lighting effects. And when you combine this with the texture stretch and interpolation arising from the combination of relief and a camera angle quite orthogonal to the texture source, this basically means one more thing you've got to clean up by hand. If they had wanted to help astronauts to get an impression on the detailed landscape, they should have taken these pictures in earlier Apollo flights - now mapping was done one round too late ... it was not possible to use detailed maps generated in A-15 mission to help "asrtonauts" of A-15 mission - maybe this was an error in numbering the missions. There is very much false information in even in Wikipedia, NASA pages and everywhere. An example -Somebody mentioned Apollo-13 ... the theories about its unmanned boilerplate have been very interesting. A Soviet spyship took it from French coast as it was dropped down after the launch (US ships were late at place). The net is full of theories how it was a plastic copy and a testing equipment. Funny. That would be the job of Lunar Orbiter. Although the CSM would overfly the landing zone before the LM landed, the film it shot would not in any way be available until after the return to Earth. But you haven't been suggesting this. You've been suggesting rather specifically that satellite sets of various eras (I used Clementine-based images for my whole-Moon renders) were used to construct via 3d graphics techniques convincing fake imagery for Apollo.
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Post by nomuse on Dec 16, 2011 3:51:33 GMT -4
From the university where I taught computer graphics in the mid-1990s. That was state of the art for anyone. If anyone is claiming NASA had some "magical" computer graphics technology in 1969 to render photorealistic images and physically-based animation, then that's just comically wrong. Really, really, really wrong. As an expert, I can categorically state the Apollo film and video was not produced by computer animation. I am not an expert, but I agree. There is something I enjoy about early 3D CGI. Maybe it's the lighting, or maybe it's that you can still count the polygons, the swooping camera movements, or the heavily synthetic synthesiser music, or something else. Many of these people were not artists, they were engineers, yet they created art. It's so very geeky and I love it. But no way could they have created Apollo imagry, video, 16mm DAS, or Hasselblad, at that time. I doubt it could even be created in the nineties, or even in the naughts. My touchstone moment at the moment is from "Apollo 13" (1995). Tom Hanks dreaming he is on the Moon, and picks up a handful of lunar soil. And the moment he pours a little from his hand the illusion shattered in a cloud of, well, dust. That was state of the art for 1995. Although they got a lot of it impressively right. (One of the most informative bits is how they recreated the lighting on the Moon -- the lighting the Apollo Deniers insist was done with some version of Hollywood lighting, multiple fixtures aiming in every direction. And here's Hollywood itself, openly simulating a lunar environment, and do they do anything at all resembling this? No. They use a point source. A crazy contraption of a point source, but still a -- essentially -- single source.)
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Post by nomuse on Dec 16, 2011 3:46:16 GMT -4
I knew this claim was bogus from personal observation, but I am a layman in that realm, so thanks to nomuse and JayUtah for saying all those experty words about it. Jay better than me. I've read books by Mr. Doom. He has MET him! (And now John Carmack is flying Armadillos into space from the heart of Texas. Small world, eh?)
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Post by nomuse on Dec 15, 2011 21:40:56 GMT -4
I have prepared few Moon pictures by taking an Apollo Panoramic camera picture (digitizing it) and then by takin contour data from Moon maps (which have been done during the same Apollo mission) and from that material by displaying a 3D model (ground-level perspective), I have obtained a nice Moon view ... just little color added to the B&W landscape (in Apollo pics tha background is also B&W with added color hue). And then I added my color photos from earth to the foreground (me feeding a camel there). And nobody can see any problems in the picture. Today, I can use similar material from LRO or Selena (from USGS I can get digital data directly). Call me doubtful. I've rendered the whole Moon and segments of lunar surface, using publicly available material. I have used both hand-created elevation data and translated DEMS. The largest issue to contend with was that no image base exists in which shadow information is absent -- although some patches on nearside are shot with a high solar angle, much of the lunar imagery contains shadowing that makes it useless as a diffuse channel. In addition, although the elevation of the Moon is not that great, it is sufficient to generate give-away texture stretch. In short, it is not possible to simply take available lunar imagery and construct believable lunar landscapes with it. You will need extensive touch-up, extrapolation, and generation of extra texture detail both in normal maps and in the diffuse, color, and specularity maps. Oh, I'd also like to single out this comment: "in Apollo pics tha background is also B&W with added color hue"Technically, any image that can be described in a CMYK color space is "B&W with added hue." But this sounds like what you are suggesting is that all the Apollo surface record was in fact B&W film, and the prints were hand-tinted before release. This is, well, nonsense. If I fix the foreground to the map coordinates x,y,z, I can fly up and around and see the landscape in correct perspective like in Google Earth. I did this just to show to my friends that photographs and videos cannot be used to verify anything. In early 70s digital image processing was a common toy ... of course it was mostly used e.g. in Landsat-1 image processing (-71 on). In Langley they did not render pictures in 1960s but used analogic and digital material together - they had a huge Moon ball with camera railway and they had taken hundreds of photos from space vehicles in different positions (probably they were able to calculate the transformations digitally). But very soon they had image processing software comparable to later commercial products (CAD, GIS, "photoshop"). When Apollo-11 was said to land, there was an animation in CBS showing the Moon surface and many americans were sure that this is real even if "animation" was shown. Time code was added and Neil's talk was pre-recorded to the movie (later said to be real). If you watch the first Apollo videos from orbit, they are very similar and you can see that the background is sometimes jamming and foreground goes fluently. manonmoon.ru/addon/f7/moon.aviIn this film NASA is preparing an exact copy of Moon surface at a landing site. If you go to 17:00 you can see how they exploded the craters and there is a comparison of real moon photo from satellite and aerial photo from the staging field and they match exactly. To fix this landscape to the 3D data I could make just perfect moon photos and put my camel there, too. www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJv5_y2l5asAre you this ignorant of the history of computer graphics? Let's throw out a couple examples. The computer game Myst, using mere stills, with ambient channels and shadow mapping instead of ray tracing, still took months at a render farm. Before that, the wireframe models of the broken antenna displayed by HAL to the astronauts on 2001 was exactly that; a wire frame model. Coat hanger wire, in fact. Painted white and shot on film. The ability to generate hours of footage with full ray-tracing (proper shadows, anisotropic reflections, etc.) is just within this decade coming down to the point of being a small (but still not trivial) task. Not only were the computers not up to it, much of the techniques had yet to be developed within your time frame. Carmack was still in school writing his first papers, for instance. No; I'm sorry if you are able to whip up something off Google Sketchbook that fools your slack-jawed friends, but creating believable fake imagery of the Moon is today still a million-dollar task requiring an imaging team and a year or two to work (as evinced by the fact that not a single Hollywood movie has yet managed the trick). Go back to when these images were being shown life on worldwide TV and, well....I lack the adjectives to express how ludicrous that is.
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Post by nomuse on Dec 15, 2011 3:00:29 GMT -4
Yes, but only marginally.
The imbeded controllers I'm working with these days are the bottom end of the AVR line...run at 8MHz or below on the internal oscillator, as little as 2K of program memory. The big difference (well, besides physical size, and the extremely small power requirements) is that within that same package you get several PWMs, A/D converters, watchdog timers, and UART. And not to snort at non-volatile flash memory, either!
It's a general-purpose machine, which by one weighting makes it more powerful, but in a direct contest with the purpose-built AGC I think the AGC comes out pretty close to neck and neck.
In any case, the actual execution cycles required to keep a mini helicopter balanced are well within the range of the AGC.
(The crazy thing, tho, is that this general-purpose computer is so cheap it is actually worth using one just to pulse an LED. That is something that makes even someone like me feel a bit of future shock.)
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Post by nomuse on Dec 14, 2011 21:32:36 GMT -4
Sigh.
Just as one egregious error, I was in a small conference room a couple weeks ago with a free-flying, autonomous, computer-controlled multi-rotor machine in full flight.
In this room filled with people (and not a few young children), and only a few feet from some big bay windows, the demonstrator slapped the side of the flying machine with his hand and left it up to the onboard computer to get itself back under control before it tore a wild rotor-screaming path through something fragile.
You may be thinking...rather, our Russian friend may be thinking...sure, with sufficient control surfaces, a nice fast computer, etc...
No. This was a quad copter with an ardupilot controller. No surfaces, no gyro, nothing but the ability to change the rotation rate of four direct-drive electric motors. And the brain was a simple AVR kicking along at 16MHz, with a whopping 64K of program memory. And it was far from overtasked!
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Post by nomuse on Dec 9, 2011 15:12:33 GMT -4
thought i just answered it "And yes it is possible i am wrong about Apollo, like i said from the start only a few people know for sure, everyone else is just making a best guess. And yes you may also be wrong. ... i still believe there are too many problems with the story, the moon landing is a great modern fantasy." In Reductio ad absurdum, all of science is "just a guess." We achieve the best understanding our tools are capable of giving us, with the understanding that we may be in error. Think about this next time you are driving, flying, walking under a powerline or over a bridge or even near a water heater. All of those potentially deadly devices were designed, built, and tested by "just making a best guess."
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Post by nomuse on Dec 3, 2011 3:09:28 GMT -4
let me say a little more about the dust on rock observation being proposed please look at image attached. if we can agree that dust deposition is a continuous process. if we can agree that meteorites are a continuous process. then let me show you the problem with this photo if the rocks are newly deposited there should be a spray pattern for the debris. The lunar soil being powdery, as the rock(s) came to rest it would leave a track or impression in the soil. if the rocks have been deposited a long time ago, the meteorites would start to break up the surface, the rocks would start to accumulate some of the debris from impacts and gather dust. The rocks would eventually be covered with lunar soil, so what could be easily proposed is a landscape with some rocks exposed to various extents and many mounds of various sizes where rocks were and where rocks still are but have became buried under accumulations of impact debris and dust . Those aren't the only options. There were more cratering events from larger objects earlier in the history of the Solar System. As you move towards the present day the frequency of impacts falls as does the average size of the impactor.
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Post by nomuse on Dec 2, 2011 4:36:58 GMT -4
LunarOrbit who is NASA answerable to? why can't they answer this question? (assuming stars can even be seen in your area) if its night where you are, why don't you try it right now if there is a clear sky, go from a bright room to outdoors. you may see some stars immediately and more in a very short time and many more as your eyes adjust to night vision. again shuttle astronaut observed that as the shuttle rose the sky became black and stars were visible. how long does it take to go from launch pad to start to see blackness of space. Fast adjustment or someone finally telling the truth? Armstrong said NO stars visible. Your room is bright as daylight? This is MY area of training, and, no, you don't have any idea of the actual magnitude of difference involved. Comparing coming out of an ordinary house lit with artificial lights to being in sunlight is about like comparing the hot sauce at Taco Bell to police-grade pepper spray.
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Post by nomuse on Nov 20, 2011 13:36:13 GMT -4
Here is an article that says "A serious solar flare hurled potentially deadly levels of radiation in August 1972, between NASA's Apollo 16 and Apollo 17 lunar landing missions, though astronauts were safely between flights on Earth during that time. Exposure levels during that flare, however, would have varied depending on whether astronauts were exploring the Moon's surface in a spacesuit or tucked inside their lander, researchers have said." article is in mht format again but it is by: Report: Space Radiation a Serious Concern for NASA's Exploration Visionby Tariq Malik, Staff WriterDate: 23 October 2006 Time: 10:01 AM ET NASA on one hand says radiation dangerous, on the other hand NASA says astronauts never effected... Rock climbing is dangerous. I'm still alive. (I've even taken a fall or two).
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Post by nomuse on Nov 20, 2011 13:34:08 GMT -4
Jason Thompson i would guess you know why i am trying to determine the size of the sun in Apollo images, because than the correct size of the earth can also be determined. the hoaxers allude to the earth not be proportional in NASA images. I for one do not believe NASA could have made such a gross mistake. but i want to try to determine this for myself. Bad way to do it. The Sun is so much brighter than any subject in the photographs it is almost certain to be blown out by over-exposure. Plus, any image with the sun entering the lens will be filled with artifacts from internal reflections. Also, any determination you make on the size of the Sun, using only THAT as a method, will only apply to the specific picture in question. There are no pictures from the surface record in which Sun and Earth appear at the same time. A better method is to determine the angular size of the photographic frame. The easy way to do this would be to trust NASA and Hassleblad and accept their statement on the angular size of the full image, then count reticules to make sure you are looking at the full frame for any print in question.
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Post by nomuse on Nov 20, 2011 2:06:39 GMT -4
you probably can guess why i posted the watchmen so here goes NASA AS11-40-5863-69 <<<resized to upload>>> is this an accurate composite? and is the sun accurately portrayed? Portrayed? Actually, though -- that is a good word here. Because photographs are NOT an "accurate record of an event" (whatever that is). The camera sees what the camera sees, as a result of the geometry before it, the lenses, the film type and sensitivity, and so on and so forth. NO camera makes a perfect capture of a scene. Nor can I conceive of what would be a "perfect" capture of a scene. As the human eye would see it? What human eye? A dark-adapted one? A color-adapted one? And, in any case...yes, this photo is completely consistent with the behavior of a film camera in a lunar environment.
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Post by nomuse on Nov 19, 2011 14:22:23 GMT -4
Can you elaborate? All I can see at first glance is it doesn't look bulky enough, and there's something seriously funky about the front hose connections. And on the full clip, I'm not buying the visor either.
What stopped me dead (besides the size of the Earth) is the lighting. Just plain wrong. Interesting, isn't it, how the Apollo Deniers like to talk about lighting issues as if they were subtle mistakes that only they were sharp-eyed enough to see -- when THIS is what Hollywood typically does.
I reserve even worse ire as an actual trained (theatrical) lighting designer, though. The reveal in the clip is that the naked glowing blue guy is standing on the Moon. Which, if they had just kept the lighting both real and consistent, would have made for much more striking cinematography; the astronaut illuminated from the rear, face in shadow...except over the turn it becomes obvious there is a counter-source in that shadow area -- eventually revealed in the reflection.
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