What is seen in this photo of the Orbiter, if it is authentic?
It's authentic.
Here is what the photographer, astronaut Joseph P. Allen, said about it in his NASA Oral History Project interview on 18 March 2004:
The first time we did an OMS [Orbital Maneuvering System] burn—it’s to change your orbit ever so slightly, after we were safely in space and the payload bay doors were open—you do the countdown and [fire the engine]. Since the burn was being done by Vance and Bob Overmyer, Bill and I had only to just look out the back and see at T-minus-zero the OMS engines ignite, and to my astonishment, it looked like the back of the Orbiter blew off. It just went [demonstrates], this enormous flash of light—[totally unexpected]. You hear kind of a “whump” of the engine starting, [and see] a flash of light. It just is there and then it’s gone, even though the engine continues to burn.
I later learned there’s a reason for that. The engines are started rich, more fuel than oxidizer, in order to make sure a clean burn starts, and then [the mixture is] made lean again, such that everything gets burned and there’s no light at all. You would think there would be light from a rocket; there’s none, at least looking out the back.
Every OMS burn from that time—I mean, we did maybe four or five during that mission—with every one, I would have a camera and at T-equals-zero I would take a photograph. To my astonishment, one of those photographs has the flash on it. [The] “OMS burn” [photo is] in the Entering Space book, [and] in several NASA publications. [It turns out] the flash lasts for only a fifth of a second, [a fact] we can tell that from video, TV cameras, camcorders. About a fifth of a second. The exposure of a camera is a sixtieth of a second, so you have to put a sixtieth of a second right during that fifth of a second, which is virtually impossible to do. But I got very lucky and was quite pleased by that result.
Isn't it a shame that the hoax believers never seem to keep metadata like this attached to the photographs they present?
I searched for and found this thread, so I'll resurrect it if you folks don't mind.
About a month or so I was searching for HB's videos. I came upon one, that I didn't link, that basically stated the any photo/image that had Photoshop/Ducky in the metadata area MEANT that it had been photo shopped. So I trucked on over to NASA, but couldn't find any images. Googled the images and found they appear to be at ASU web site. Found many that had descriptions added and knew those are obviously photo shopped, but did find one of A16 that did not have any descriptions. After downloading and opening in one of my hex editors, found:
"CCPPhotoshop ICC profile<bh:00><bh:00>x<bh:da>c"
toward the beginning of the file.
Now not being a camera buff or have photoshop even installed on my lap, brought me to a screeching halt.
Googled something like faking LRO images (or something close to that) lead me to some forums in which there appeared to be a description of the information. That's how I now know that this information is metadata. But none of the links were live still.
So I know some of you guys can fill me in on the real reason this information comes from the file?
Edit:
Can't add the file, but the name is M192817484LR_thumb.png "Astronaut's Eye View of Apollo 16 Site"
