Missing Planetoid

[Jason Thompson]

grandlunar1980 said:

The bright lights that appear as Orion are all the same brightness and coloration.

Betelgeuse definitely looks orangey to me, and the stars of the sword are all different colours.

[Bob B.]

jasonthompson said:

There seems to be some confusion about what's in that picture. Hopefully this will help. This is how I interpret that picture.

That's pretty good except Rigel is the bright one to the far left, not at the top. And although I originally agreed with your horizon, I think it might actually be a little lower than that. There appears to be a star just below your indicated horizon that matches the position of the star p⁵ as shown in the chart. Once we get below the airglow layer the background all looks black. I think its really difficult to say for sure where the black sky ends and the limb of the Earth starts, though I generally agreed with your illustration.

EDIT: I see you just caught your own mistake regarding Rigel.

[Bob B.]

bob said:

grandlunar1980 said:

The dots just seem too bright for a 4 second exposure of stars, even if it was the constellation Orion.

Four seconds does seem a like a fairly short exposure, but we don't know what F-stop or film speed was used. Without this information it is hard to conclude anything. I don't have too much of a problem with it.

Elaborating on this a little bit…

Let’s say your normal ‘daylight’ exposure is 1/250 second at F/16. If you change the shutter speed to 4 seconds you’ve increased the exposure 1,000 times. Let’s say at the same time you change the f-stop to F/2, which is a 64X increase in aperture area. You’ve now increased the exposure 64,000 times. That should be enough to photograph stars, particularly considering you’re in space with no haze or light pollution. It is also possible they used a high-speed film, such as ISO 1000. If so, we could be seeing an increase in exposure of several hundred thousand times over that for normal daylight conditions.

[Grand Lunar]

I disagree as to the indicated position of the horizon. It wouldn't be below where we see the light reflecting off Earth's atmosphere.

I just realized something else bothering me. It's the size of the constellation.
From such a vantage point in LEO, I find it hard to believe that Orion would appear so huge, espeically when seen from orbit.
I know it looks big in the sky, but that's probably due more to an illusion, similar to the moon's size appearing larger.

I'm only hypothesizing on this. Who, oh who, can we look toward for finding a definiate answer?

[Tanalia]

Orion is rather large -- from diagrams such as in Bob B.'s post #128 or Wiki: Orion (costellation), the main body of the constellation (covering Betelgeuse, the belt, and Rigel) nearly fill a rectangle in the sky 20^o tall by 15^o wide (closer to 25^o by 20^o if you add the arm and club/sword).

[Grand Lunar]

Hmm, interesting. I haven't thought it would appear so from a view in LEO, though.

Regardless of whether or not this is really a view of stars, I can rest assured, though, that it doesn't support Greenmagoo's view of Apollo being a hoax.

[Bob B.]

grandlunar1980 said:

I disagree as to the indicated position of the horizon. It wouldn't be below where we see the light reflecting off Earth's atmosphere.

That’s not light reflecting off the atmosphere, it’s an aurora display high above the Earth's surface, generally above about 100 km altitude. I’ve seen other photos that shows a clear gap between the bottom of an aurora and Earth’s horizon.

grandlunar1980 said:

Regardless of whether or not this is really a view of stars, I can rest assured, though, that it doesn't support Greenmagoo's view of Apollo being a hoax.

How can anyone conclude Apollo was a hoax from that picture? That’s absurd.

[PhantomWolf]

*bangs head on desk*

Look, all the bright spots are stars, including the the ones under the aurora. I have created this animated version and while they don't line up perfectly, all the bright spots are represented on the chart.

WARNING: LARGE IMAGE

The stars aren't the only things that can appear through the Earth's atmosphere when in LEO.

[reynoldbot]

You guys just need to be able to convince grand lunar that the orange stripe is not the earth's atmosphere and you're set. I can definitely see that it's part of the aurora. Maybe you could bring up some other examples of aurora being seperated from the earth's limb.

[Grand Lunar]

PW, no need to bang your head on the desk!

I'm afraid I fell victim to the "doesn't look right" situation. I've never seen images of auroa that followed the limb of the Earth. It seemed to me that the stars were below Earth's horizon.

Indeed, I would like to see other examples of what Reynoldbot suggests.

What is shown in the image was something I've never seen before. I mean, I've seen imags of aurora, but not with stars appearing like this do in this image.

You know...."Thing's we've never seen before! WEIRD SCIENCE!"

How can anyone conclude Apollo was a hoax from that picture? That’s absurd.

Greenmagoo claims that if stars can appear in a 4 sec exposure, they should have been able to be seen in similarly timed exposures on the lunar surface by the Apollo astronauts.

Your info on the film used leads me to hypothesize that this particular film was of a type that could show stars with a short exposure. It also seems that they're on the night side of Earth. I imagine it'd be impossible to show with a daylight photo.
Am I close?

[Kiwi]

grandlunar1980 said:

I'm afraid I fell victim to the "doesn't look right" situation. I've never seen images of auroa that followed the limb of the Earth. It seemed to me that the stars were below Earth's horizon.

Exactly, which is the same as many HBs do. They might be quite ignorant of what they are actually seeing, but they insist that because it looks like x to them, it must be x. Meanwhile, experienced photographers shake their heads in dismay.

You assumed you were looking at the earth's horizon and insisted that that's what the orange is. Others of us who are more familiar with photography and stars straight away recognised what we were actually seeing -- that's why I identified that little trio on the right that's below the orange and in the black. They are Orion Lambda and Orion Phi 1 and Phi 2. And to their left is bright Bellatrix, also down in the orange. The bright star at top center is Saiph, and between Rigel and the top left corner there are five bluish stars that are over the border in Lepus and also identified in Bob B's star map.

In fact, you appear to have neglected to very closely compare the photograph with the star map and also missed that the caption in Bob's post No. 128 says, The stars in Orion's head and his left shoulder are seen through the orange airglow layer, giving the illusion that the stars are closer than the horizon.

Perhaps you were taken in by that illusion.

I deliberately identified a lot of the blue stars last night because of you saying they were interior lights, but unfortunately my log-in time expired just as I posted the details and they vanished somewhere in cyber-space. I couldn't retrieve the post using the back button.

However, Jason Thompson's artwork helped.

[Data Cable]

grandlunar1980 said:

Greenmagoo claims that if stars can appear in a 4 sec exposure, they should have been able to be seen in similarly timed exposures on the lunar surface by the Apollo astronauts.

Even assuming this duration would be sufficient to capture stars using Apollo Hasselblads and film, I defy him to hold a camera steady by hand for 4 seconds.

[JayUtah]

With ordinary processing and viewing the ASA 160 E-3 emulsion will not show stars in a 4-second exposure. It takes at least 15 seconds for a star to show up to the point where you can see them in the transparency under normal conditions.

My ISO 400 equivalent digital picked up Mars at 4 seconds on the night when it was closest.

[Bob B.]

reynoldbot said:

Maybe you could bring up some other examples of aurora being seperated from the earth's limb.

grandlunar1980 said:

Indeed, I would like to see other examples of what Reynoldbot suggests.

Ask and ye shall receive…

www.braeunig.us/pics/aurora1.jpg

This is a very grainy scan but it definitely shows the Earth’s horizon more clearly. You can see the aurora display high above the horizon with a band of dark sky in between (except at the left where the perceptive is such that the aurora appears to extend all the way to the surface).

[Bob B.]

grandlunar1980 said:

Greenmagoo claims that if stars can appear in a 4 sec exposure, they should have been able to be seen in similarly timed exposures on the lunar surface by the Apollo astronauts.

It's irrelevant whether a 4-second exposure can show stars or not, the Apollo astronauts didn't take any 4-second exposures. This is nothing more than an 'if I ran the zoo' argument. Who cares what Greenmagoo thinks the astronauts could have or should have done? The fact they didn't do it is not evidence of anything.