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Post by Data Cable on Jun 28, 2005 0:44:21 GMT -4
The PR value alone of taking a photo of the Earth amongst the stars is incredible, and would take very little extra time or effort to do. It is quite simply impossible to simultaneously capture stars and a correctly-exposed sunlit object on photographic film in the same shot. If they had tried to photograph the earth among the stars as you suggest, all they'd get back would be either a correctly-exposed Earth against a seemingly solid black background (of which there are many examples in Apollo photography), or a field of visible stars surrounding a completely over-exposed, solid white circle which would be absolutely unrecognizable as the earth. By reflecting off of the surrounding terrain. It would take more than a quick glance upward to see any stars, it would require the surrounding terrain to be completely blocked from the astronauts view for several minutes before their eyes would adjust enough to make out stars. Assuming that you have clear skies and don't live close to bright, sky-polluting city lights, you can try this yourself. Walk out of your brightly lit house into the night air and look up. How long is it before you can make out any stars?
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Post by JayUtah on Jun 28, 2005 1:56:23 GMT -4
I would like to get a hold of the unedited footage of the Sibrel clip so I can see the entire event play out.
Order the Apollo 11 extended DVD set from Spacecraft Films.
Could you specifically answer why they have these cutout templates on board the spacecraft at all?
What "cutout templates" are you referring to?
The neglect they showed by not photographing stars in specific leaves a bad taste in that they would or could have such little regard for how important or relevant it would have been to take these photos.
A handheld Hasselblad 70mm camera with a wide-angle lens and ISO 160 film is an exceptionally bad instrument for astronomical photography. It cannot be held still enough, the optics are unsuitable, and the film is not sensitive enough. But it is an exceptionally good instrument for documenting the astronauts' activity and their lunar surroundings.
The Apollo 16 astronauts took appropriate cameras to the moon for photographing stars. There is no photograph of stars that can be taken on the moon that can't also be taken from low Earth orbit. There is nothing magical about the surface of the moon for stellar photography.
The PR value alone of taking a photo of the Earth amongst the stars is incredible, and would take very little extra time or effort to do.
No. It doesn't matter how cool it would be; it's impossible with that equipment.
...is text and graphic from Eric Hufschmid's website.
Well, I refuted Eric Hufschmid's statements at length some time ago. He showed up at Bad Astronomy to try to defend himself, but instead just told everyone they were obviously dumber than he and that if they didn't want to talk about 9/11 then he wasn't going to defend his Apollo arguments from criticism. The only thing we ever got out of him was a whole lot of bluster and handwaving.
There is no atmosphere to scatter the sunlight, so when an astronaut (or camera) looks up at the stars, how could the reflected light from the lunar surface get into his eyes?
Go outside and try to look up without also seeing a part of the ground. If you have sunlit ground in your line of sight, that will determine your eye's window of sensitivity. I talked to astronaut Ed Mitchell and he said that he could go into the shadow of the lunar module and look up, and that if he let his eyes adjust to the darkness he could see some of the brighter stars.
As for the camera, even if you managed to point it upward so that it doesn't see anything lit by the sun, or the sun itself, you still need a shutter speed of about 30 seconds at f/5.6 to expose starlight. It's impossible to hold a camera still enough for that long by hand.
If you are standing on the moon and you look up, you're going to have either the sun, the Earth, or some part of the terrain in your field of view. Stars are comparatively very dim, even without Earth's atmosphere in the way. You have to remove all other sources of light in order to let your eyes adjust. As for photography, you need a steady camera and more sensitive film, such as provided in the Apollo 16 Schmidt camera.
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Post by turbonium on Jun 28, 2005 2:57:52 GMT -4
The way I see it, what they did was actually the only one of three possible options to take if one wanted to hide something. 1.If they removed the footage entirely, they would obviously be censoring/hiding the footage known publicly to exist. I have the entire online video downloaded, as do countless others, no doubt. It is still online today, btw. 2.If the anomalous footage was brought to the same quality level as the rest of the DVD footage, whatever is there will be AT LEAST as good as the online video, but the overwhelming odds are that it would be much better quality, since the other 99.9% of the footage is!. 3. So, they were only left with option three - make that 0.01% of the footage worse, so that the best existing footage in the public domain remains the highly compressed online video! And then hope people like me don't shout and scream attention to it! Thx for all your great replies, btw! You're some smart cookies!
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Post by JayUtah on Jun 28, 2005 9:49:42 GMT -4
Apollo used what was then common video recording technology. Unfortunately now it's not common, and to access the original recordings requires equipment that no longer exists except in a very few places, and is difficult to maintain. This means we have to rely either on copies that have been made over the years, which are sometimes of poor quality and invariably incomplete. Or we have to wait until someone spends the money to convert the entire collection from the original formats to a more modern, accessible standard. NASA has limited funds for doing that. That's where people like Mark Gray come in. But unfortunately Mark is a businessman and has fiduciary responsibility to his vendors, employees, and shareholders. He can't just give away the fruits of his efforts for free.
Real historians know that accessing primary sources often means going to where those primary sources are kept and complying with whatever the conservators mandate. We're lucky to have the Apollo videos online for free download, but the price we pay for that convenience is the realization that what we get are "goodwill" copies -- brief clips made by people according to their own limited time, talents, and equipment and from whatever sources were easily available to them. Freely accessible does not mean free of charge.
No responsible image analyst would use such poor secondary sources -- regardless of how or why they exist -- without accounting for the effects of reduced quality. Conspiracy theorists use cheap online material because, well, it's cheap. It's convenience data. But they aren't willing or able to deal with its shortcomings. Why does NASA even have them? Because they satisfy casual interest. Real researchers still do it the old-fashioned way and have to pay the costs incurred in getting access to the high-quality material. Why doesn't NASA provide high-quality copies of its historical data for free? Because our taxes would skyrocket (pun intended). Fairness would require that all government departments and agencies give out high-quality stuff for free. But "for free" in government means "tax-funded." So instead of making publicly acessible video-on-demand at DVD quality for the Apollo videos in their entirety, they make the people who actually want such things pay the government to support it.
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Post by Kiwi on Jun 28, 2005 9:57:53 GMT -4
The neglect they showed by not photographing stars in specific leaves a bad taste in that they would or could have such little regard for how important or relevant it would have been to take these photos. Who says, besides you and a handfull of hoax-believers? The object was scientific exploration of the MOON, not the stars. Just because YOU think it was important, doesn't mean that it was at all in the overall scheme of things. I don't think it was, and nor do many others here. No-one was obligated to fulfill YOUR faulty expectations. Nor mine. It certainly doesn't leave a bad taste in my mouth -- in fact, I completely fail to understand why you say this. It's only important to those who can't grasp that the Apollo missions actually took place as the records state. The reasoning that it looks very similar to viewing from Earth is kind of a weak one, imo.Why? Because you simply don't understand the answers you have already been given? Please don't waste our time by ignoring us -- we put a lot of work into trying to help you. Sometimes it's necessary to examine an explanation meticulously, word by word, sentence by sentence, and read it over and over until you understand it. I do this all the time because I want to learn and refuse to be a thicko. Anything less than this is an insult to those who put in the effort to help. Think of this. The sun orbits the moon once a year, right? Therefore, at any one time it is as far away as it can possibly be from where it will be in six months time. Right? (Look up the figures and do yourself a scale diagram.) Therefore, the stars, by your reasoning (you're following every word here, right?), should look very different every six months. It should be possible to see them in 3D with a stereo pair of photos taken six months apart, right? Wrong! In actual fact, they don't look much different at all -- they are all too far away. Only with high-precision instruments can astronomers see a slight parallax shift when comparing the closest stars with distant ones at six month intervals. They can't measure any parallax change at all in the distant stars. The PR value alone of taking a photo of the Earth amongst the stars is incredible, and would take very little extra time or effort to do.I fully agree with the first part of this, but is the second part proving that you either didn't read, or didn't bother getting to understand my post above where I gave you the numbers and showed that it's IMPOSSIBLE? Was it just a waste of time trying to help you? Okay, from a photograhic point of view the moon is just a rock sitting in the sun. So YOU photograph it AND show the stars behind it in a straight, unmanipulated photograph (or get someone to help you do it), and post the results so we can see them. From what you insist, it should be a piece of cake, right? Wrong! It's impossible! Still don't believe me? I'll repeat myself in a slightly different way in the hope that you'll get it this time, though I have a feeling that you may not WANT to get it. Let's work it out: 125th at around f11 to f16 (the sunny 16 rule) with 100 ISO film should give a good exposure of an unobstructed moon if it's between full and first or last quarters. But even the brightest stars need an exposure of at least 8 seconds at f2.8, and you'd be better off catching them at around 20-30 seconds. Which are you going to expose correctly? The stars OR the moon? YOU CAN'T GET BOTH IN THE SAME SHOT. IT'S IMPOSSIBLE. Prove this yourself. Just do it! And by the way, you'll need a tripod, which the astronauts didn't have for their Hasselblads. Six times they had the chance to do it at least one time, and didn't.Wrong again, because it's impossible. Do your homework, man! You seem to be one of very few people who believes it is possible. This is not Star Wars and Hollywood we're talking about, this is reality. Regarding the sun stopping astronauts seeing the stars, I've already given you an experiment you can do to check this out yourself. You don't have to be on the moon to do it. Note that I said DARK sky and DARK area. Any light that enters your vision from anything other than the stars will muck up the experiment. It happened to the astronauts, and I guarantee that it will happen to you. But I wasted my time telling you, right? <Fixed typo>
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Post by Joe Durnavich on Jun 28, 2005 10:06:19 GMT -4
So, they were only left with option three - make that 0.01% of the footage worse, so that the best existing footage in the public domain remains the highly compressed online video!
Mark Gray of Spacecraft Films is easily reachable. He hangs around the ProjectApollo group on Yahoo. You can ask him why he chose those compression levels.
If your DVD player has a bit-rate meter, you can verify that the entire video segment is encoded at a low bit rate. Since there is a lot on that DVD with the landing, a 4-hour EVA at multiple angles, it appears that Mark allocated the least bandwidth to the mission video so that he could encode the film and photos at a higher quality. This is reasonable considering that the video signal, although color this time, is still very low bandwidth.
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Post by Kiwi on Jun 28, 2005 10:21:11 GMT -4
The first test period was about 10 hours into the flight. The ground controllers simply wanted a picture -- any picture -- from the capsule in order to see whether the onboard systems were working. Since Mission Control couldn't see the picture, and since protocol prevented the ground stations from talking directly to the capsule, there was a sort of awkward three-way exchange going on. The picture was fuzzy and wavy, and the television technicians at the ground station had to relay suggestions to Houston for the astronauts. The Mission Control operators couldn't see the picture, and so they wanted the astronauts to sort of narrate what was going on, so that when they got the tape playback from Goldstone over the MSFN television link later, they could match up what they were seeing with what the astronauts had described. During this transmission the astronauts had questions about exposure and other camera settings. Mission Control relayed up some suggested camera settings and then the Goldstone folks commented about how those affected the picture. While doing a little research tonight I noticed that this transmission actually went out to the American public a few hours later. First on the Moon -- A Voyage with Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, Edwin E. Aldrin Jr, written with Gene Farmer and Dora Jane Hamblin, epilogue by Arthur C. Clark. Michael Joseph Ltd, London (1970), page 109: "The television transmission started coming into Goldstone at 10:32:40 GET, when the spacecraft was at an altitude of fifty thousand nautical miles. It lasted a little more than sixteen minutes. Two and one-half hours later, starting at 8:45 p.m. Houston time, the first Apollo 11 show was put on the American networks. But this was an unscheduled transmission; it had not been in the flight plan..."
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Post by JayUtah on Jun 28, 2005 10:45:30 GMT -4
Oh, an addendum.
I'm planning a trip to Washington DC later this fall during which time I plan to do a lot of Apollo-related research from primary sources. However, I've been following some discussions about how the National Archives has treated it. Like most government agencies, the archives are underfunded and way behind on cataloguing lots of material. Much of the Apollo data -- which is absolutely huge in volume -- falls into that category. To access uncatalogued information at the Archives you must know exactly where in their collection it lies and request it by location. It is absolutely forbidden to "browse" unindexed collections. Having been a librarian in a prior lifetime, I thoroughly agree. You have no prayer of discovering or imposing order on something when its original order has been rototilled by careless researchers,
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Post by Kiwi on Jun 28, 2005 11:51:32 GMT -4
Typically when the MSFN television links were activated, the ground stations would the tapes over them to Mission Control. Can't figure out what's missing here. P.S: I claim the "I sighted an extremely rare species -- a JayUtah typo" teeshirt.
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Post by JayUtah on Jun 28, 2005 12:00:37 GMT -4
LOL! It's Apollo Mad Libs! Insert verb.
The sentence should read, "...the ground stations would play the tapes over them..."
I hope you don't find any errors of fact or logic in what I write. Unfortunately you'll find lots of typos. Omitted words are my specialty. What's even worse, "not" is a word I frequently omit.
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Post by echnaton on Jun 28, 2005 13:58:22 GMT -4
turbonium
Lets put it this way. If the astronauts had come back with photos of the earth with a star field behind it, a lot of astronomers and photographers would have been suspicions. It is precisely these knowledgeable people, both professional and amateur, that are not widely suspicions of the Apollo photographic record. It is typically people who can demonstrate little technical knowledge that sound the alarm, but alas every time its turns out to be a false alarm. Please continue to ask questions, because many readers here benefit from the knowledge in the answers, but as a matter of courtesy, please read and respond to the answers in a manner corresponding to the thought that is put into them.
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Post by JayUtah on Jun 28, 2005 16:34:10 GMT -4
The stars argument is a lot more complicated than it needs to be.
Photographically there's simply no wriggle-room. The photographic film just can't get both stars and sunlit objects. No way, no how. Yes, if the famous shot of Aldrin had had stars in the background I would have been highly suspicious, and so would all my photographer friends. The exposure requirements aren't even close. The exposure parameters for stars versus sunlit objects differ by several orders of magnitude. It's the same as saying a snail could overtake the space shuttle -- just not even remotely possible. (Well, technically I guess it's possible as long as the shuttles are grounded, but you know what I mean.)
And so I occasionally get people who say they think they can see a star in some photograph or video. These are Apollo-sympathizers, and I despair that they're taking the conspiracist arguments at face value. The object is not to find stars so that the conspiracy theorists will shut up. The object is to convey the proper understanding of why we won't ever see stars in Apollo 70mm photographs. Just because you see a white speck doesn't make it a star. Even if it seems convincing, we know through mathematics that it must be something other than a star.
But when you put that argument to bed, the other one springs up: why didn't they go to special lengths to photograph what must have been a brilliant display of stars, for scientific or P.R. purposes.
Again that's all based on faulty assumptions. The atmosphere attenuates very little light in the visible spectrum. The stars are not especially brighter in space. In terms of brightness, being up high in the mountains on a clear night will give you a star display not too different from what you could see in space. It's breathtaking, to be sure. But it's not any easier to photograph. You still need exposures of several seconds.
The notion that the stars are brilliant in space is based on wrong preconceptions. They're marginally brigher, not dramatically brighter. And if you're on the sunlit side of the moon puttering around, or in the cabin of your spaceship with the lights turned on, you're just not going to see them. Air or not, they're still too dim to compete with the sunlight, or even a good 40-watt light bulb near you.
I own some very nice cameras. I happen to have a lens that I can set to the same field of view as the Zeiss lens on the Hasselblad. I show people what it's like to take pictures that way. I slap it on the digital back and go outside to take pictures of the moon and stars. The moon is a disappointing little white blob in the center of the image when shot with that lens. The Hasselblad cameras simply weren't ever intended for any kind of astronomical observation. They were intended for the astronauts to use photographing their activities, the condition of the space craft, the ground around them, and their physical discoveries. That's all.
And so why didn't the astronauts take special equipment that would see the stars, i.e., fast film and long lenses? They did! You can see it in the shadow of the Apollo 16 LM. Not every mission did that because not every mission had to do every experiment. The Hasselblad cameras were not themselves an experiment. So on one mission you take UV photographs of the stars and Earth, and on another mission you measure the lunar atmosphere. That's why you fly multiple missions.
But there's nothing magical about the lunar surface for astronomy. The only thing that has to be observed from the lunar surface (or at least from very far away from the Earth) is the Earth itself. If you want stunning pictures of stars, you can take them from low Earth orbit. They don't look any different from there than they do from the lunar surface.
But to say that P.R. requires you to get pictures of the astronauts cavorting on the lunar surface with brilliant stars in the background is simply disconnected from reality. That's not what it looked like.
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Post by turbonium on Jun 28, 2005 19:23:46 GMT -4
OK -thanks for the replies - and kiwi I'm not ignoring your info - the fact is that it was phantomwolf who brought that subject over here from another forum where I was posting.. It was not my intention of discussing the stars issue here in the first place - so please don't get antsy about it if I forgot to post back about the stars. I do appreciate the effort you are putting in to answer my questions, so don't feel it's a waste of your time. OK?
My question was originally about the templates, and that has been answered for me - I only need to locate the entire footage to confirm what has been explained.
My only other topic was the anomalous footage in the Apollo 12 video and the "smeared up" or "pixelated" DVD version. That is still the open question I have, and really the only one which is in need of serious answers -
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Post by turbonium on Jun 28, 2005 19:29:21 GMT -4
Apollo used what was then common video recording technology. Unfortunately now it's not common, and to access the original recordings requires equipment that no longer exists except in a very few places, and is difficult to maintain. This means we have to rely either on copies that have been made over the years, which are sometimes of poor quality and invariably incomplete. Or we have to wait until someone spends the money to convert the entire collection from the original formats to a more modern, accessible standard. NASA has limited funds for doing that. That's where people like Mark Gray come in. But unfortunately Mark is a businessman and has fiduciary responsibility to his vendors, employees, and shareholders. He can't just give away the fruits of his efforts for free. Real historians know that accessing primary sources often means going to where those primary sources are kept and complying with whatever the conservators mandate. We're lucky to have the Apollo videos online for free download, but the price we pay for that convenience is the realization that what we get are "goodwill" copies -- brief clips made by people according to their own limited time, talents, and equipment and from whatever sources were easily available to them. Freely accessible does not mean free of charge. No responsible image analyst would use such poor secondary sources -- regardless of how or why they exist -- without accounting for the effects of reduced quality. Conspiracy theorists use cheap online material because, well, it's cheap. It's convenience data. But they aren't willing or able to deal with its shortcomings. Why does NASA even have them? Because they satisfy casual interest. Real researchers still do it the old-fashioned way and have to pay the costs incurred in getting access to the high-quality material. Why doesn't NASA provide high-quality copies of its historical data for free? Because our taxes would skyrocket (pun intended). Fairness would require that all government departments and agencies give out high-quality stuff for free. But "for free" in government means "tax-funded." So instead of making publicly acessible video-on-demand at DVD quality for the Apollo videos in their entirety, they make the people who actually want such things pay the government to support it. Thanks for the reply - but let me reiterate that the quality of the DVD version is entirely better than the online videos (as one would hope and expect) - that is, except the short segment of footage I orginally noticed as containing anomalies (before the DVD was released). That is the curious part of all this - the online version is BETTER quality than the DVD for just this little segment.
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Post by turbonium on Jun 28, 2005 19:34:08 GMT -4
So, they were only left with option three - make that 0.01% of the footage worse, so that the best existing footage in the public domain remains the highly compressed online video!Mark Gray of Spacecraft Films is easily reachable. He hangs around the ProjectApollo group on Yahoo. You can ask him why he chose those compression levels. If your DVD player has a bit-rate meter, you can verify that the entire video segment is encoded at a low bit rate. Since there is a lot on that DVD with the landing, a 4-hour EVA at multiple angles, it appears that Mark allocated the least bandwidth to the mission video so that he could encode the film and photos at a higher quality. This is reasonable considering that the video signal, although color this time, is still very low bandwidth. Thanks - I will try to locate him for an answer to this - but the compression type and ratio levels are really not the issue - put it this way - if the entire DVD set was the same quality as the approx. 30 seconds I am talking about, there would be a mass refund rate from irate customers! You'd be better off watching the little Real Player version online! (Well, for the part I'm talking about, you ARE better off watching the online version!)
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