ApolloHoax.net
Apollo Discussions => The Hoax Theory => Topic started by: pzkpfw on September 26, 2012, 07:16:10 PM
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The main N.Z. auction site occasionally gets Hoax threads. Latest here: http://www.trademe.co.nz/Community/MessageBoard/Messages.aspx?id=1123283&topic=7
Someone just linked to a hoax website I'd not seen before: [noparse]http://fakechuckwestfall.wordpress.com/2012/08/26/the-apollo-xi-one-light-photography-workshop-reloaded[/noparse]
(By "Out of interest" I just mean, there's not often a hoaxer who posts here, so just thought people might be interested to see another example of what's going on out there. The auction website I linked to is about as mainstream "Joe Average" as you can find in N.Z.; so I find it interesting to watch the forum to get an idea of what "Joe Average" is talking about.)
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We apparently can't even read the trademe.co.nz site without registering. Is this true?
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We apparently can't even read the trademe.co.nz site without registering. Is this true?
Darn! Sorry - I'd forgotten that. Registered members only, can access the forum.
(And it's certainly not worth doing, just to see the odd hoax claim.)
My apologies.
(I'd modify post #1 to point that out, but I've missed the time-window of opportunity to do that.)
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That's okay, I also checked out the "fakechuckwestfall" site. Wow, Canon's standards must be really low if they actually hired him as a photographic "expert".
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Well clavius.org still gets an average of 650-750 unique IP visits per day, with an as-yet unexplained spike of 1,200 visits per day on average during August 2012. According to my SEO friend, that indicates a sustained high level of interest.
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Well clavius.org still gets an average of 650-750 unique IP visits per day, with an as-yet unexplained spike of 1,200 visits per day on average during August 2012. According to my SEO friend, that indicates a sustained high level of interest.
I posted links to clavius a couple of times in that (unavailable) thread in the OP. (Initially because one of the anti-HB people hadn't heard of the "cross hairs issue" so linked to the relevant clavius page. Made for a good resource because it lists both the claims and the answers).
Which day/s in August? Could the death of Neil Armstrong have generated a lot of general Apollo related web browsing?
One thing I was looking for: something that demonstrates (pictures/diagrams are always good) that something low-down on the Moons surface will be collecting much less light reflected off the surface than something higher up. Anyone got a good link?
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The "The" Aldrin pic shows it well. Although he is bending slightly at the knees which could be put out as an excuse.
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Which day/s in August? Could the death of Neil Armstrong have generated a lot of general Apollo related web browsing?
Bingo. I'm kind of surprised I didn't immediately think of that, mostly because I didn't realize how long ago Armstrong passed away. But yes, the graphs pretty conclusively show a spike in the few days after his death. (See attached)
One thing I was looking for: something that demonstrates (pictures/diagrams are always good) that something low-down on the Moons surface will be collecting much less light reflected off the surface than something higher up. Anyone got a good link?
I don't have a link specifically to that, but it's one I've been meaning to consider. Clavius has been neglected lately, aside from brief corrections and updates. I need to work on that. Anyway, back to your point: the underlying physics concept is "view factor" or "configuration factor" as it applies to radiative heat transfer, and to photometry in general. Those are the terms and contexts that are likely to lead to successful web searching. Lambert's law also applies, and illustrations of it may prove useful. Photometry and radiometry are the related sciences of measuring light. Radiative heat transfer is one of the applications of the science, where the geometric relationship between emitters and absorbers has a quantitative effect on the result. Hence if you look at discussions of how to formulate the configuration factor in heat-transfer computations (or, if you prefer a purely photometric application, in radiosity rendering algorithms), those are often illustrated with helpful diagrams.
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One thing I was looking for: something that demonstrates (pictures/diagrams are always good) that something low-down on the Moons surface will be collecting much less light reflected off the surface than something higher up. Anyone got a good link?
While they would hardly be acceptable scientifically, the effect is illustrated fairly well in the photos of Buzz Aldrin descending to the lunar surface wearing his pristine spacesuit, AS11-40-5862 to 5869, although non-photographers might have trouble seeing it. Keep in mind that these photos have been manipulated to make Buzz clearly visible -- in unmanipulated versions he is darker from underexposure of the film. But compare his upper body with his lower legs and boots. The boots get darker as he descends, while his upper body remains fairly consistent.
The last photo, AS11-40-5869, shows it best, where only the shiny blue boot heels are visible, most likely from the sunlight bouncing of Neil Armstrong's suit.
Note also the view factor that JayUtah mentions. Any surface that is facing more toward the surface gets more light, and any that's facing toward the sky gets less. Compare Buzz's calves and backs of his thighs in 5869. Also compare the back, sides and bottom of his PLSS in a few of the photos.
Also in AS11-40-5862, 63, 64 and 66, the highlights on the ladder rungs get brighter from bottom to top as they "see" more of the surface.
Read the captions at the ALSJ for more detail about the photos.
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Lambert's law also applies, and illustrations of it may prove useful.
It gets complicated because the moon is most definitely not a Lambertian reflector. Light is scattered much more strongly back along the direction it came, as we can see from earth during a full moon when it is much more than twice as bright as a half moon. This is variously known as the "opposition effect" or the "zero phase effect".
The effect is even stronger than you might think from the brightness of the full moon because the only time the moon's illumination phase as seen from earth is actually zero is during an eclipse of the moon -- and then we're in the way. You'd get a similar effect from the shadow of an object standing on the surface, but depending on the geometry the shadow may or may not significantly decrease the backscatter.
Like I said, it gets complicated. You pretty much need a complete 360 degree photo pan of the surface from the location in question. Then you need to numerically integrate over the whole thing to determine how much light falls on you from each direction. And of course it will change as the sun continues to slowly move over the scene.
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Correct, the Moon is not Lambertian. But explanations of Lambert's law include discussions and diagrams of how the aspect of the reflector (i.e., its solid angle) as seen by the receiver determines the amount of light it reflects to that receiver. That was the question: how to illustrate the effect of aspect.
As for the Moon's peculiar property as a retroreflector, the diagrams used by Torrance and Sparrow may be helpful. Their illumination models were based on reflectivity as a function of spherical trigonometry (x,y,u,v) formulation of angles of incidence and the view angle.
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As for the Moon's peculiar property as a retroreflector,
Be careful calling the moon a retroreflector. I already know of several hoaxers (hunchbacked among them) who claim that the natural lunar surface can account for the returns seen from lunar laser ranging.
Arguments about the short (1 ns) widths of the return pulses proving the existence of small (< 1 m), highly reflective and therefore artificial objects on the lunar surface go right over their heads because they are completely unable to understand quantitative arguments.
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Good caution to take, as I've also been bitten by that sort of claim. But facts are facts, regardless of whether they work rhetorically for or against us. To me, "retroreflector" is just the appropriate shorthand for "Light is scattered much more strongly back along the direction it came." They are equivalent concepts, one just stated more succinctly than the other.
Indeed we must discuss retroreflection in order to explain the lighting in the Apollo photographs. We must demonstrate retroreflection in order to show that the effect exists and accounts for what we see on the shaded sides of objects on the Moon. That's basic photometry. There is no way to do that without putting the idea in the minds of hoax claimants that retroreflection alone accounts for the laser returns from the corner-cube retroreflectors. Yes, it is "messy" to make the appropriate arguments that invoke location and strength of the return signal, but that's the right way to do it, in my opinion, as opposed to trying to be two-faced, deceptive, or evasive about the actual retroreflective properties of the lunar surface. Hoax claimants won't care one way or another, but you maintain your scientific integrity.
In my opinion Mythbusters did it right. They aimed the laser at some random part of the lunar surface and showed the "no return" condition. Then they aimed at the LRRR and got back the measurably stronger signal. Granted not all of us can do that demonstration.
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Amazingly (or not so amazingly) He Who Must Not Be Named took strong exception to the Mythbusters' demonstration at Apache Peak. He claimed that since, long ago, MIT used a different laser and different telescope to catch echos off the bare lunar surface, the APOLLO demo proved nothing.
Again, quantitative arguments would quickly settle all this but they are completely over the hoaxers heads. In fact, I believe a defining feature of the conspiracist crackpot is an almost complete innumeracy. This certainly goes for every Apollo denier I've ever encountered, and I believe it goes for many other conspiracists as well, if for no reason than many of them subscribe to just about every conspiracy theory they find.
I just finished Among the Truthers and this is a point the author also makes: conspiracists come in all kinds, and about the only thing you can say about them in general is that belief in one conspiracy theory is strongly correlated with belief in another (or many).
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Amazingly (or not so amazingly) He Who Must Not Be Named took strong exception to the Mythbusters' demonstration at Apache Peak. He claimed that since, long ago, MIT used a different laser and different telescope to catch echos off the bare lunar surface, the APOLLO demo proved nothing.
I think he might be getting confused between Laser and Radar (I have already seen that he doesn't understand Radar from discussions I have had with him about tracking spacecraft on orbit)
Back in the 1960's and early 1970's, Gordon Pettengill used MIT's Haystack Observatory to bounce radar signals off the Moon. He also used Arecibo (Cornell) for that same task, as well as the first radar studies of the asteroid Icarus.
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I think he might be getting confused between Laser and Radar (I have already seen that he doesn't understand Radar from discussions I have had with him about tracking spacecraft on orbit)
No, it was in 1962, here's a link that mentions it:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/1996/timeline-1030.html
The difference is that the retroreflectors give a nice sharp return pulse from a single point, while the lunar surface gives a blurred pulse from a broad area.
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I just finished Among the Truthers and this is a point the author also makes: conspiracists come in all kinds, and about the only thing you can say about them in general is that belief in one conspiracy theory is strongly correlated with belief in another (or many).
Though I found it interesting that Apollo is never mentioned in that book. To me, it was an additional piece of evidence that Moon Hoax belief is declining.
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Both laser and radar were bounced off the moon pre-Apollo. (Radio hams still do it regularly with radio as a sort of ultimate because-it's-there challenge. It's called EME or Earth-Moon-Earth or simply "moonbounce".)
The laser used off the natural surface emitted much higher pulse energies and much longer pulses than those used with the Apollo and Lunokhod retroreflectors, and their receive signal-to-noise ratios were much worse. Even if short pulse lasers could have been built with sufficient energy, the multipath would smear the return pulses over microseconds, rendering them useless for the kind of precise measurements needed to test relativity, the constancy of G, the evolution of the moon's orbit, the earth's polar wobble, and the many other scientific applications based on measurements with centimeter (or better) accuracy of the earth-moon distance.
This is precisely why the lunar retroreflectors were proposed, and why they were considered so scientifically valuable that one flew on the very first Apollo landing mission, one that the powers-that-be wanted kept as simple as possible.
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Though I found it interesting that Apollo is never mentioned in that book. To me, it was an additional piece of evidence that Moon Hoax belief is declining.
This came up in the NPR interview with the author, and your guess is correct: he said he had difficulty finding enough who thought Apollo was a hoax to provide a representative sample. I think he was also mostly interested in 9/11 conspiracy theories since they are among the most offensive and outrageous of the modern theories. (As much of an Apollo fan as I am, I have to agree it's even more offensive than claiming Apollo was a hoax.)
You get a sense of hopelessness reading most of the book, the feeling that the human race is going nuts and there's nothing we can do about it. But then he actually makes some viable and thoughtful suggestions. His best was to teach about conspiracy theories in the first year of college, before most students have a chance to get sucked in by them. He specifically recommends teaching about The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion, both because of its extreme historical significance and because literally no one in academia today will still defend them as legitimate.
I guess it's like how no one objects to teaching Greco-Roman mythology (or naming space programs after its gods) because no one still actually believes that stuff.
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The difference is that the retroreflectors give a nice sharp return pulse from a single point, while the lunar surface gives a blurred pulse from a broad area.
Exactly. Even the largest telescopes will still illuminate an area on Luna several km across; the atmosphere tends to decollimate the beam. As long as the return comes from an area that large, it will necessarily be spread out in time by surface curvature even if it were absolutely smooth. The return must come from a small reflector to keep the pulse width small.
As small as the LRRRs are, the returns are still significantly broadened by the finite size of the reflectors and the moon's libration. They were manually aligned quite well using a sundial and bubble level, but because they do not actively track the earth as it moves a few degrees every month in the lunar sky most of the time the array isn't exactly normal to the earth. One part of the array is closer to the earth than another, and that spreads out the return pulse.
Because radio signals have a much longer wavelength than light, and because amateur radio antennas (even big ones) are relatively small, they tend to illuminate the entire lunar disk (and more). Moonbounce operators are used to working with extreme multipath fading, and the design of digital modulation methods for the EME channel has been very challenging. I'm proud of the fact that a ham friend and I published a paper in 1995 with some ideas that another ham picked up, implemented and made work with much smaller antennas and less power than had ever been used in ham EME. And that ham is a Nobel laureate in physics...kinda neat.
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Phil Webb did a very good detailed examination of the laser ranging experiments here :
and
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But then he actually makes some viable and thoughtful suggestions. His best was to teach about conspiracy theories in the first year of college, before most students have a chance to get sucked in by them. He specifically recommends teaching about The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion, both because of its extreme historical significance and because literally no one in academia today will still defend them as legitimate.
You mean like this course: http://www3.griffith.edu.au/03/STIP4/app?page=CourseEntry&service=external&sp=S2401BPS&sp=S3121&sp=SUGRD&sp=SNA&sp=SP&sp=SNA&sp=l0&sp=SStipHome&sp=SCourse+search&sp=3&sp=SKeyword&sp=T&state:CourseList=BrO0ABXcaAAAAAgAAE3RvdGFsTWF0Y2hlZENvdXJzZXNzcgARamF2YS5sYW5nLkludGVnZXIS4qCk94GHOAIAAUkABXZhbHVleHIAEGphdmEubGFuZy5OdW1iZXKGrJUdC5TgiwIAAHhwAAAAAXcRAAAOc3RhcnRQYWdlSW5kZXhzcQB%2BAAAAAAAA
In case the link doesn't work, it's Griffith University's Skepticism, Science and the Paranormal unit.
Course overview; definition of terms. Approaches to the paranormal and other belief systems. The nature and position of science: intellectual and social aspects. The nature and position of the paranormal: different types of paranormal claims. Skepticism and ways of investigating the paranormal. Paranormalism, skepticism and the media.
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Yeah, but it's in Australia. Offer a course like that in the USA and you'd have an angry mob of fundamentalists outside the adminstration building.
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The laser used off the natural surface emitted much higher pulse energies and much longer pulses than those used with the Apollo and Lunokhod retroreflectors, and their receive signal-to-noise ratios were much worse.
Indeed, if you understand the science you realize why such early endeavors were useless as ranging exercises. Hoax believers don't understand the science. In their simplistic worldview, "But you can bounce a laser off the bare lunar surface," is sufficient to put a pseudo-intellectual veneer over the supposition that there are no artificial retroreflectors on the Moon.
The question in terms of debate is whether to go down the rathole. Part of it depends on why you're debating. The compliments I get most frequently are, "I learn so much from your site and your debates." And that's laudable. But not everyone wants a science lesson; they just want to know whether smart people put any stock in the hoax theories. Sometimes the sufficient answer is, "No, you can't actually range the Moon with a laser unless there's a special mirror." You don't have to go into multipass fading, pulse length, atmospheric scatter, or any of the very real details in which the devil of laser rangefinding lies.
If you're sparring with hoax believers just for fun, then there is a rhetorical aspect you need to consider. You always want to the truth to come from you, not from your opponent. The hoax claimant gets a rhetorical boost when he says, "The Apollo defenders didn't tell you that lasers were bounced off the Moon before Apollo." You're immediately put on the defensive, and that's when the true-but-confusing quantitative arguments fall the most flat. To the untrained ear they really do come off sounding like techno-babble backpedaling, even though it's the truth. Winning a debate is about being logical and truthful, but also knowing how best to present the truth.
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Indeed, if you understand the science you realize why such early endeavors were useless as ranging exercises.
Not useless, just not accurate enough to do all the interesting things that are now being done with the LRRR data.
Hoax believers don't understand the science.
Tell me something I don't know!
In their simplistic worldview, "But you can bounce a laser off the bare lunar surface," is sufficient to put a pseudo-intellectual veneer over the supposition that there are no artificial retroreflectors on the Moon.
Right. I've tried to ask why, if they're only showing they can get a reflection from the moon, they keep doing it over and over. The point is to make high accuracy range measurements over a long period of time for numerous scientific tests. "Accuracy" is a quantitative term, so it's hard to avoid giving at least some numbers. And whether one laser or another laser setup can get its reflection off the moon is a quantitative question, so the fact that one can doesn't mean that all of them can, regardless of design.
White's claim that the demonstration at Apache Point didn't prove anything is tantamount to accusing either the Mythbusters or the observatory staff of deliberate lying or falsification of data. And it's very hard to argue with someone whose every answer to a piece of evidence is "they're lying". (Hunchbacked, on the other hand, has become so utterly delusional that he now claims that the various alleged LRRR sites are simply natural features that have somehow fooled the various observatories. It's become nearly impossible to believe this man's assertion that he has an engineering degree.)
Winning a debate is about being logical and truthful, but also knowing how best to present the truth.
Very true.