I'm glad to know you're OK and hope your efforts were somewhat successful!
Ditto. My previous response was rushed and not particularly civil. Always good to hear that first responders are staying as far out of harm's way as their job lets them. I too live in a part of the world prone to wildfires. I can sympathize.
The overlaid ghost image is washed out by the brighter primary image, and only becomes apparent in large dark areas such as shadow or the black lunar sky.
In photography, we say something is washed out normally because the exposure is set such that the dynamic range is not enough to differentiate detail in the brighter areas of the image. This is clearly what's happening in the upper left portion of the lunar landscape. However we can wash out detail by other means. Imagine the sun shining on a dirty window, and you're trying photograph something dark through it. The scatter on the window, if it intervenes directly between you and the dark thing you want to photograph, will wipe out the detail in the darks. You can see this effect directly, but you perceive it as just, "Gee, it's hard to see out of this dirty window." In photography lingo, that would also be an appropriate usage of "washed out." But I honestly don't think that's what the ALSJ authors are intending to say with respect to this image.
I have more to say on the subject of when artifacts of interreflection should be seen and when they shouldn't but let's see if C.W. gets this far.
The effect would be seen with any camera, since it is a result of looking through the multiple panes of LM windows.
Pedantically speaking, when interreflection occurs it can be seen with the naked eye and with any camera and any
unfiltered lens. However, it is very likely the reflection can be eliminated using any of various polarizing filters. Reflections almost always come to us polarized in a different direction than the primary image. Properly aligning the polarizing filter will probably eliminating the undesirable reflection. Put simply, I can take my $2,700 camera body with a $5,000 lens and photograph the interreflection if I can see it with the naked eye. Conversely I can put a $24 circular polarizer in front of a $30 webcam and make the reflection go away.
Why weren't the Apollo lenses fitted with polarizing filters, then? You definitely don't want them in place the whole time. If your goal is to faithfully photograph what you see, you don't want a polarizer. And the lens hoods were fixed, with no option to accept a filter. None of the photography contemplated for the mission needed filters.
Then find someone with actual qualifications in optics or photography who is questioning it.
Questioning it in the sense of suspecting it's not a valid photograph taken in the field as claimed. Any photographer that studies historical photographs spends a lot of time just idly wondering what things are in photos, what caused various effects, etc. I would certainly expect people (professionals and amateurs both) to be curious about why these effects appear. I wouldn't expect them to jump so quickly to the conclusion that the photos aren't what they say they are.
There were ways to get hold of those images dating back to when they were first developed. It just needed a little more effort. It was not, however, beyond the reach of joe public to do it before the internet came along.
Pre-Internet authors like Kaysing and Rene also talked about the "suppressed" Apollo record, because they were able to get photographs that they rightly claimed weren't often seen. Prior to the Internet, most people saw only the Apollo photos that were editorially interesting. That's not NASA's fault. That's the fault of the people who wrote the books and articles and made the films. Most of Roll 37, for example, is quite boring. No commercial editor is going to publish that in its entirety in the context of something aimed at the general public. So there's the disconnection between "What I've often seen" and "What is available."
Er, that is a scientific description. Take it from a scientist...
I never know what to do with the arguments that go, "Yes, you gave me an answer, but I want a
scientific answer." I mean, obviously it's a stab at
ad hoc revision. But we rarely get around to determining what a "scientific" answer is to some particular question. Does that mean it has to be the subject of some scholarly paper, rigorously peer reviewed and thoroughly documented? Or even just public discussion among people we might think of as relevant scientists? Does NASA have to get involved? These options always strike me as a plea for attention. Conspiracy theorists want to believe they're serious researchers who have found serious problems, and only an edict from very important people is worth their attention. That's pure ego.
But then I wonder whether they want an answer that conforms to scientific methods of inquiry and test. Well, here we have it. We formulate a hypothesis based on known principles of optics and incorporating the physical elements we know to be present in the purported venue of this photograph. We deduce that if the hypothesis we imagine is true, it would affect more than just the shadows. It would have the potential to affect all visible features seen through the window. Then we look in the available data to see whether such shifted non-shadow features appear. They do, so this falsifies the notion that two light sources are casting two shadows. That's the hypothetico-deductive model at work.
