Hunchback aka inquisitivemind.

[Noldi400]

When I pointed out that the Apollo cameras were specially modified by having their viewfinders, mirrors and secondary shutters removed, and that this could significantly speed up picturetaking, I was presented with mined quotes stating that the Apollo cameras were "standard", as though that word could magically do away with the obvious differences. I now see that equivocation - using words with multiple or ambiguous meanings - is one of their favorite tactics.

Interesting. I also pointed out that he was proceeding from a false assumption since he had not actually established the cycle time for the Hassie EDC model.

Foos posted a video clip from ALSJ where Jack Schmidt was talking while he was shooting a pan and you could actually hear the camera drive motor  (sound conduction through the suit, maybe?) and it seemed to me to have a very fast cycle time. I refuted whatever it was that Foos was claiming on that particular video and he snotted that I had missed the entire point of his vid.

Is there a name for the logical fallacy of "you're not smart enough to understand"? Appeal tm Self-Delusion, maybe? Sort of a first cousin to Dunning-Kruger, I guess.

[ka9q]

Do we actually know what the film advance time was for the Apollo version of the Hasselblad 500EL? The one without a viewfinder?

[nomuse]

That one's always been a non-starter for me.  Sure, you can calculate that theoretically n many pictures can't be taken in n many minutes.  But why would you calculate an average when you can just log the actual events?  The majority of the pictures can be tracked as to exactly when they were taken by being mentioned in the continuous audio, as well as often being seen being taken in the video record.

If you have a 2:30 minute EVA caught on 2:30 minutes of audio tape, and when you play that tape back, they mention 138 times "hey, that's a good one.  Lemme step back for another," then what exactly would be the point of taking the totals and dividing one by the other and then squinting at the number and trying to decide if it is too small?

[dwight]

ssssshhhhh nomuse. That type of logical thing will ruin everything.

[ka9q]

FoosMasoos' claim is not that the average picture taking rate was too high, but that the Hasselblad's maximum rate was too slow for a particular pan sequence that Apollo 15's Dave Scott is seen taking on TV. He clicks his own Hasselblad trying to show that it wasn't fast enough.

But his argument has several fatal flaws, the biggest being an apples/oranges comparison: Foos' Hasselblad is a standard 500EL with viewfinder and reflex mirror that took a surprisingly long time to flip up and down for each shot. The Apollo cameras were modified by removing the viewfinder, mirror and secondary shutter (not sure what that was) and that would obviously let the camera shoot faster. We don't know what other speed modifications might have been made to Apollo's version, but with lunar EVA time costing millions of dollars per minute I'm sure it occurred to somebody to make those cameras as fast as possible. Nor does Foos tell us his shutter speed; I wouldn't put it past him to pad the results with a slow shutter speed. He also didn't seem particularly anxious to press the shutter release for each new shot.

The discrepancy he claims wasn't all that big to begin with, so these little factors could all be quite significant.

When confronted with these problems, he and his supporters naturally try to shift the burden of proof claiming that we had to prove that NASA's version could take pictures fast enough -- not for him to prove that it couldn't.

Just about every hoaxer I've ever met tries to shift the burden of proof. They don't buy Carl Sagan's saying that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Or they turn it around and claim that going to the moon was so extraordinary that it requires the extraordinary proof -- as though we didn't already have quite a bit of it given that Apollo was probably the most thoroughly documented engineering project in human history.

 

[Peter B]

That one's always been a non-starter for me.  Sure, you can calculate that theoretically n many pictures can't be taken in n many minutes.  But why would you calculate an average when you can just log the actual events?  The majority of the pictures can be tracked as to exactly when they were taken by being mentioned in the continuous audio, as well as often being seen being taken in the video record.

If you have a 2:30 minute EVA caught on 2:30 minutes of audio tape, and when you play that tape back, they mention 138 times "hey, that's a good one.  Lemme step back for another," then what exactly would be the point of taking the totals and dividing one by the other and then squinting at the number and trying to decide if it is too small?

To be fair, I don't think the Apollo astronauts called many of their photographs. In some cases I think it takes a lot of effort to assign GETs to a lot of photos, and that only works on the assumption that Apollo is real. In other words, I doubt you could use the photographic record in that way to prove the reality of Apollo.

[ka9q]

Foos posted a video clip from ALSJ where Jack Schmidt was talking while he was shooting a pan and you could actually hear the camera drive motor  (sound conduction through the suit, maybe?)

That led to an amusing side discussion -- how could the sound of the camera motor make it to the microphones through the vacuum of space? Obviously they were actually on earth in an atmosphere, somewhere in Area 51, clear proof the whole thing was a hoax!

I hadn't noticed this sound before, so I first listened around and confirmed that it does indeed appear only when taking pictures. (The sound is similar to that produced by interference in analog radio systems, and that's what I first thought it might be.) So how did it get into the astronauts' microphones? I seriously doubt that it could get there acoustically even on earth; their microphones were of the noise-canceling type and the helmet was a pretty good obstacle to sound. Conduction through the suit is a possibility, but that seems unlikely given that it's a soft, flexible material.

I noticed that the sound was a fairly pure tone; it didn't really sound like a motor and gear train picked up by a microphone. A bigger clue was that while you can hear the motor come up to speed, you never hear it slowing down. The whine just cuts off. I then realized that we were almost certainly hearing EMI - electromagnetic interference. The camera motor, battery and wiring produced a magnetic field interrupted at an audio rate by the brushes and commutator in the DC motor. This field can easily penetrate the camera body (aluminum is nonmagnetic) and the pressure suit and induce a small signal in any nearby electrical circuits.

The camera is mounted on a bracket on the front of the PLSS remote control unit on the astronaut's chest. Right next to it is the connector and wiring carrying earphone and microphone audio between the PLSS radio and the headsets on the astronauts' "Snoopy cap".  You don't hear the motor slowing to a stop because turning off the power at the end of a cycle immediately cuts off the current flow and the magnetic field it produces.

Naturally our hoaxer friends were skeptical about this explanation, even though this kind of EMI problem is all too familiar to any electrical engineer or technician. You're really handicapped trying to explain such things to people lacking even a minimal understanding of physics and, more importantly, any honest desire to learn anything that might kill the hoax delusion that seems to be the main source of the meaning and purpose to their lives.

[nomuse]

So he only meant that there were too many frames taken in a particular panorama for the time given?

That's a little more clever.

Only not really.  I want a term for this because as the dialog goes on it happens more and more.  The Apollo Denier has this emotional attachment to the first argument they heard (or dreamed up) and liked.  But what happens, when they are finally dragged kicking and screaming away from the primary form, that emotional longing pushes them to offer a related or evolved argument.

AD: "No stars in the pictures."

RS: "Daylight film."

AD: "They should have brought 'better' film."

RS: "Apollo 16."

AD:  "But they didn't report seeing stars here and here, and..."

[Noldi400]

I want a term for this because as the dialog goes on it happens more and more.

I think what you're referring to is called "moving the goalposts". Each time you answer a claim, the HB changes the claim slightly so that your answer no longer fits, which eventually leads the exchange far afield from the original claim.  If the HB is successful, he will finally get to an unanswerable question, then assert that you were unable to answer his original claim.

[Glom]

Foos posted a video clip from ALSJ where Jack Schmidt was talking while he was shooting a pan and you could actually hear the camera drive motor  (sound conduction through the suit, maybe?)

That led to an amusing side discussion -- how could the sound of the camera motor make it to the microphones through the vacuum of space? Obviously they were actually on earth in an atmosphere, somewhere in Area 51, clear proof the whole thing was a hoax!

I hadn't noticed this sound before, so I first listened around and confirmed that it does indeed appear only when taking pictures. (The sound is similar to that produced by interference in analog radio systems, and that's what I first thought it might be.) So how did it get into the astronauts' microphones? I seriously doubt that it could get there acoustically even on earth; their microphones were of the noise-canceling type and the helmet was a pretty good obstacle to sound. Conduction through the suit is a possibility, but that seems unlikely given that it's a soft, flexible material.

I noticed that the sound was a fairly pure tone; it didn't really sound like a motor and gear train picked up by a microphone. A bigger clue was that while you can hear the motor come up to speed, you never hear it slowing down. The whine just cuts off. I then realized that we were almost certainly hearing EMI - electromagnetic interference. The camera motor, battery and wiring produced a magnetic field interrupted at an audio rate by the brushes and commutator in the DC motor. This field can easily penetrate the camera body (aluminum is nonmagnetic) and the pressure suit and induce a small signal in any nearby electrical circuits.

The camera is mounted on a bracket on the front of the PLSS remote control unit on the astronaut's chest. Right next to it is the connector and wiring carrying earphone and microphone audio between the PLSS radio and the headsets on the astronauts' "Snoopy cap".  You don't hear the motor slowing to a stop because turning off the power at the end of a cycle immediately cuts off the current flow and the magnetic field it produces.

Naturally our hoaxer friends were skeptical about this explanation, even though this kind of EMI problem is all too familiar to any electrical engineer or technician. You're really handicapped trying to explain such things to people lacking even a minimal understanding of physics and, more importantly, any honest desire to learn anything that might kill the hoax delusion that seems to be the main source of the meaning and purpose to their lives.

A ha.  Got you!  Everyone know that electromagnetic radiation can't travel through the vacuum of space.  Oh wait.

[ka9q]

A ha.  Got you!  Everyone know that electromagnetic radiation can't travel through the vacuum of space.  Oh wait.

This led to the incredulous (they're always so incredulous) complaint that space suits that can stop the lethal radiation of space from frying the astronauts can't stop a little magnetic field from a camera?

And it went downhill from there. I might as well be trying to explain Apollo to our cats.

[ineluki]

And it went downhill from there. I might as well be trying to explain Apollo to our cats.

Apollo is boring for cats, try Schroedinger's Mouse.

[cjameshuff]

A ha.  Got you!  Everyone know that electromagnetic radiation can't travel through the vacuum of space.  Oh wait.

There was someone on BAUT that was somehow convinced this was the case. He had a strange set of beliefs including the idea that transverse waves had limited range in vacuum, explaining why stars weren't visible on he moon, but were made visible by the ionosphere converting longitudinal waves (!?) to transverse waves. He kept insisting on "proof" that star photos could be taken in vacuum in the form of photos taken by consumer cameras from the ISS, despite the ISS being within the ionosphere. Towards the end he was claiming that the close inspection the Shuttle windows received after each trip was to check diffraction gratings that somehow did the same thing, not because of the possibility of orbital debris impacts.

Reasons for a vast conspiracy to cover up the opacity of the vacuum to normal light were never given.

[Noldi400]

When confronted with these problems, he and his supporters naturally try to shift the burden of proof claiming that we had to prove that NASA's version could take pictures fast enough -- not for him to prove that it couldn't.

Then he claimed that the speed of the picture taking wasn't the point of his video. When I asked what his point was, he replied that I didn't get the point of the video, I wasn't smart enough to try to advocate for Apollo. I was dashed. 

A related comment on the Apollo Hassies. In one transcript, someone (Cernan, I think) made a comment something like "I think this mag's empty - it didn't click". Evidently it was possible to feel the shutter click through the fingertip "thimbles".

To be fair, I don't think the Apollo astronauts called many of their photographs.

Not specifically, but there was a lot of "Get a before shot here." or "OK, I'm gonna do a quick pan" or "Stand still for a second so I can get a shot".

[twik]

A ha.  Got you!  Everyone know that electromagnetic radiation can't travel through the vacuum of space.  Oh wait.

There was someone on BAUT that was somehow convinced this was the case. He had a strange set of beliefs including the idea that transverse waves had limited range in vacuum, explaining why stars weren't visible on he moon, but were made visible by the ionosphere converting longitudinal waves (!?) to transverse waves. He kept insisting on "proof" that star photos could be taken in vacuum in the form of photos taken by consumer cameras from the ISS, despite the ISS being within the ionosphere. Towards the end he was claiming that the close inspection the Shuttle windows received after each trip was to check diffraction gratings that somehow did the same thing, not because of the possibility of orbital debris impacts.

Reasons for a vast conspiracy to cover up the opacity of the vacuum to normal light were never given.

I was really intrigued by that one. It certainly was a new CT to me, and its author knew a certain amount of technobabble. However, he played an excellent game of "keep away" with the actual point he was trying to make. I was rather dashed when he was banned - it was like getting to the last chapter (or what you think is the last) of a novel, only to find the pages torn out.

I don't think he was onto anything, I just wanted to know what he was going on about. Why exactly did he think the scientific community was hiding the evidence that light isn't visible in a vacuum?

I've concluded that this is one telltale sign of a crank. They won't actually come right out and tell you what their point is, for fear that you'll attack it directly.