When back on Earth, Gene Cernan described, in his usually eloquent way, his memories of how our planet looked from the Moon:-
143:20:00 Parker: And, 17, if you want to take a minute, you might look up in the sky and notice that our (TV) camera is taking a beautiful picture of Mother Earth.
143:20:10 Cernan: Isn't that pretty over...Can you see the Massif, too?
143:20:14 Parker: Now we're coming down to look at the Massif. Had a beautiful picture of the Pacific there? Ed (Fendell) finally found it. Now we see the Massif.
[Schmitt - "Ed had been in charge of the Communications Console for as long as I could remember."]
[Cernan - "The Earth looked big; and, like the Moon looks down here, it probably wasn't as big as it looked. Yet, because the Earth's beauty was so predominant, there was also a feeling that it was the most precious possession a man could stow in his memory. There was the beauty of the colors of the oceans and the clouds: multiple shades of blue, from the azure of the Caribbean to the deep dark blues of the Pacific; the shades of white of the clouds and the snow; and the black of space around it. There you were, standing on the surface of the Moon in full sunlight, looking at the Earth, a quarter million miles away, surrounded by the blackest black. Not darkness, but the blackest black a human being can conceive in his mind. I think the perception that the Earth looks bigger than it really is probably comes from the majesty of its colors and from the fact that you are there on the Moon, looking back at it. It's an overpowering figure of life in the sky."]
["Even on the TV, it is a spectacular view. It's a half Earth and you can see clouds and the blues of the oceans. With your naked eye, you could make out continents. You can imagine working on the slope of the Massif on top of the Scarp and, every once in a while you have to look over your shoulder to look at what's looking at you and think about where you are and what you're doing. Sometimes, it still hardly seems like it was real. It sometimes almost seems like we were too nonchalant, worrying about fractures and rocks and rake samples and all that when the Earth was over our shoulders."]
[At maximum zoom, three Earths would fit across the vertical width of the TV screen and about five horizontally. From the lunar surface, Earth's angular diameter is 1.9 degrees and, before Fendell went to maximum zoom, it appeared as though Earth was about ten diameters or 20 degrees above the apparent summit.]
See the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal
https://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/frame.htmlApollo 17
The Journal
The Second EVA
Geology Station 2 at the base of the South Massif
That last paragraph in the quote brings us to a similar thing in the OP.
Back in the early- or mid-2000s, one hoax-believer made a big thing of some Apollo 17 photos which, to him, "proved" that the moon landings were faked. And he actually did a good job of going through all the usual sums that showed that Earth could never have been that close to the moon's horizon. It was far too low, so the photos were faked, and therefore the moon landings were faked. Or so he thought. But he had missed an important point:-
Those photos are AS17-137-20957 to 20961, which Cernan shot around GET 143:22:42,
at a steep angle up the side of South Massif, instead of horizontally across a flat lunar plain as the HB had assumed.
https://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a17/AS17-137-20957HR.jpghttps://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a17/AS17-137-20958HR.jpghttps://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a17/AS17-137-20959HR.jpghttps://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a17/AS17-137-20960HR.jpghttps://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a17/AS17-137-20961HR.jpgThe last two include the top of Boulder 2 at Nansen Crater.
I don't recall any photos taken across a flat plain at Taurus-Littrow that show a flat horizon without mountains or hills in the background, except for tiny areas in the west where the hills are over the horizon.
This is just another example of an HB not doing his homework and finding out exactly how the photos were taken and exactly what the lunar surface is that they show. Furthermore there's the evidence that Ed Fendell produced by continuously panning, tilting and zooming the TV camera around the geology site and up at Earth, then back down to the lunar surface and the astronauts.
Some HBs also take Cernan's quote about the blackest black "proving the fake because the stars should be shining so brightly."
In doing so they show that they know nothing about how dim stars are when compared to the much brighter sunlit scenery, and also show that they know nothing about dark adaption for seeing stars and have probably never done their own experiments with it.
I do it often on clear moonless nights in my near-dark-sky area. Lie down in a dark room for seven or eight minutes with eyes open, then go outside (avoiding white light on the way) and view the amazing southern stars in all their glory, instantly seeing the Magellanic Clouds and a few seconds later Omega Centauri, the finest globular cluster of all. It never ceases to be awe-inspiring, but it's a boring sight when under bright lights with my iris stopped down and rods and cones not doing their job.
