Shadow boxing - latest addition to my site

[onebigmonkey]

For your consideration - this is an idea I've been toying with for a while, so I started on Apollo 11 to see how it would turn out.

http://onebigmonkey.comoj.com/obm/shadowa11.html

In a nutshell I'm looking at the movement of shadows from objects of known height across the lunar surface during the Apollo missions to see if it matches what we would expect. Of course it does.

There will be a preamble page giving some links to information, but at the moment this isn't linked to on my usual front page as I wanted to see what people thought.

It's all back of an envelope stuff, and part of me thinks "this is bloody obvious", but then, so much of it is!

[beedarko]

Great work.

I can hear the HB cries of "giant synchronized motor-driven studio light" already.   

[AstroBrant]

That's a very good start.
You were trying to reconcile the predicted and measured lengths of the LM shadow. I remembered from something a few months ago when I was looking at the elevations from Google Moon. The LM is in kind of a depression. So I checked the elevations again. Sure enough, the surface rises five feet from the base of the LM to where the shadow would have ended.I'll bet your difference is right there.

Note: the surface continues to rise another foot to the west, then levels out and gradually slopes down. This is entirely consistent with 5931, which you show on your page. We're seeing just to the top of that slight north-south rise, creating a false horizon. That's why the shadow almost reaches it.