LRO photos show ascent stage still on the ground?

[Zakalwe]

Perhaps Edward did not want to post such a ridiculous question "in public" in case his dearly held opinions got another drubbing?

I take images of the Sun, using a variety of equipment. I image in both white light (ie with a thin plastic sheet, not unlike Mylar, on the front of the 'scope which blocks the majority of the light from the Sun) and also in hydrogen-alpha (using a Lunt telescope that employs a Fabry–Pérot interferometer to block all but the hydrogen-alpha portion of the solar output).

I can cheerfully report that I have never seen another star in the image, not matter how much I process the data in Photoshop. Maybe my images are faked too? In fact (if I use a typical HB belief system), my whole life must be faked too <disappears in a cloud of HB non sequiturs >
The Sun can also be viewed in a variety of wavelengths over at helioviewer.org. I've yet to see another star in any image. I'd be (slightly) interested to hear Edwards explanation of this? If his thinking is correct then my images and the images of thousands of other amateur and professional imagers should also contain stars.

[ka9q]

Armstrong and Aldrin certainly didn't have time to try it on their trip to the Moon, although they could see stars through the LM's optics (which could avoid stray sunlight).

Apollo astronauts reported that the stars weren't all that easy to see even in the navigation optics; there are many such comments in the various mission reports. I can think of several good reasons, such as cabin lights, sunlight through the windows, not allowing enough time for dark adaptation, etc.

[ka9q]

I can cheerfully report that I have never seen another star in the image, not matter how much I process the data in Photoshop.

This makes me appreciate what a feat it is for the coronagraph in the SOHO spacecraft to see background stars despite being pointed directly at the sun...

[Echnaton]

Actually, that wasn't the comparison I was making.

My apologies.  In retrospect I obviously misread your post. 

[twik]

The hoax concern that "sometimes they said they could see stars, sometimes they couldn't -FAKE!!!1" strikes me like saying "sometimes the weather report tells me water falls from the sky, and sometimes it doesn't. Must be fake!"

The thing that I find so interesting about this is how it morphs. Originally, it was quite simple - the stars on the lunar surface should have been so blazingly bright that not only would they be capturable by cameras set to properly expose the surface, but the astronauts should have spent long stretches just gazing at them in awe. You know, rather than doing the work they were sent to do. When it became very evident that this was not true, the argument started to revolve around "some astronauts said they saw stars in orbit, some said they couldn't. Clearly, someone is lying". I've noticed the APOD image being dragged in, as though it was anything other than a rather fanciful sketch, not well thought out by the artist.

It seems that they believe there must be *something* about the stars that's wrong, and they'll keep plugging at it until they find something that will stick.

[Andromeda]

I know several people who, in a suitably dark site, can pick out the Andromeda galaxy with the naked eye.  I can stand right next to them and peer as hard as I can and not see it at all.  Fake?

[Jason Thompson]

And yet when there's a tiny spider crawling up the wall across the room...

[Andromeda]

And yet when there's a tiny spider crawling up the wall across the room...

Hey, that's different!  I have spidey-sense!

[Glom]

The hoax concern that "sometimes they said they could see stars, sometimes they couldn't -FAKE!!!1" strikes me like saying "sometimes the weather report tells me water falls from the sky, and sometimes it doesn't. Must be fake!"

The thing that I find so interesting about this is how it morphs. Originally, it was quite simple - the stars on the lunar surface should have been so blazingly bright that not only would they be capturable by cameras set to properly expose the surface, but the astronauts should have spent long stretches just gazing at them in awe. You know, rather than doing the work they were sent to do. When it became very evident that this was not true, the argument started to revolve around "some astronauts said they saw stars in orbit, some said they couldn't. Clearly, someone is lying". I've noticed the APOD image being dragged in, as though it was anything other than a rather fanciful sketch, not well thought out by the artist.

It seems that they believe there must be *something* about the stars that's wrong, and they'll keep plugging at it until they find something that will stick.

You don't mean to say they're thrashing about for anything that could point towards their desired conclusion, do you?

[Zakalwe]

I can cheerfully report that I have never seen another star in the image, not matter how much I process the data in Photoshop.

This makes me appreciate what a feat it is for the coronagraph in the SOHO spacecraft to see background stars despite being pointed directly at the sun...

To be fair though, the SOHO coronographs (it has two on board) have discs that blocks out the body of the Sun, to allow the cameras to record the faint corona elements. The discs are much larger than the apparent diameter of the sun as well.


This is an image form the C3 coronograph.

[sts60]

twik wrote:

The hoax concern that "sometimes they said they could see stars, sometimes they couldn't -FAKE!!!1" strikes me like saying "sometimes the weather report tells me water falls from the sky, and sometimes it doesn't. Must be fake!"

Ya know, I'm not even sure what Edward's claim is, and I hope he sees fit to clarify it.  His PM-relayed post identified what he said were contradictions in different bits of items for public consumption and basically said there shouldn't have been.   Is he actually saying this is evidence that Apollo as a whole was faked?   Until he checks back in, we can't say for sure.

The thing that I find so interesting about this is how it morphs. Originally, it was quite simple - the stars on the lunar surface should have been so blazingly bright that not only would they be capturable by cameras set to properly expose the surface, but the astronauts should have spent long stretches just gazing at them in awe.

[Stargazer]"Quintzillions."[/Stargazer]   Again, stars on the Moon are brighter than from the Earth, but not amazingly so... and you will always be looking at them through, at a minimum, some nice thick Lexan.  On some thread here or elsewhere we kicked around the optical properties of the visor and shields.

You know, rather than doing the work they were sent to do.

Not part of Edward's argument so far, but yes, Apollo was a planetary science mission, not an astronomy mission, and the crews' time was very tightly constrained.  Even so, we have at least one Apollo astronaut who did take the trouble to visualize stars during a lunar EVA.

When it became very evident that this was not true, the argument started to revolve around "some astronauts said they saw stars in orbit, some said they couldn't. Clearly, someone is lying". I've noticed the APOD image being dragged in, as though it was anything other than a rather fanciful sketch, not well thought out by the artist.

Great historical events of extended duration are ripe for this kind of cherry-picking; conspiracists often make unrealistic demands for perfect narrative consistency among sources widely varied in time and rigor.  I can easily prove World War II was a hoax by this method.

It seems that they believe there must be *something* about the stars that's wrong, and they'll keep plugging at it until they find something that will stick.

[Spongebob]Yeah, well, good luck with that![/Spongebob]  I have yet to encounter a hoax believer who really knows much of anything about astronomy.  Over on BAUT, poor Solon tried to claim that he believed Apollo happened, yet due to some magic physics stars (and planets, etc.) were not visible outside of the ionosphere.   He got rather badly wrapped around the axle when it was pointed out that these claims necessarily contradicted each other.

[Andromeda]

I hope he has noticed that his latest question has been very well and unemotionally answered by one of the members he chose to insult more than once -- Andromeda -- whom he may not have realised is one of our female regulars.

I haven't seen any evidence that my gender matters to him, TBH.

[Chew]

I know several people who, in a suitably dark site, can pick out the Andromeda galaxy with the naked eye.  I can stand right next to them and peer as hard as I can and not see it at all.  Fake?

You must learn the riddle of averted vision.

[cos]

The thing that I find so interesting about this is how it morphs.

They do that a lot.

Remember the picture of the astronaut coming down the ladder that they claimed was impossible to illuminate  without fill in lighting? Mythbusters debunked it with a single light source and a surface with the same albedo as the moon to prove the fill in effect of reflected light. They now claim this is proof of how it was done (er...so the fact a photo claimed to have been taken on the lunar surface looks like you would expect it to look is evidence that it was faked..d'oh).

Also the claim that the earth you can see out of the window of Apollo 11, when it was half way to the moon, was a sticker (because it is written in HB lore that you cannot transgress the inpassable Van Allen belts). So to debunk this rot someone matched the weather patterns from weather satellites with the apollo photo (taken within a few hours) and they concurred. To further bury the sticker claim, someone took an image from the beginning of the transmission and the end and showed that the 'sticker' earth had infact rotated by the the amount you would have expected in that time. The new HB claim (built on the work that they did not do) is that the earth is rotating too fast. This claim is based on HB selected datum's. Any suggestion that their datum's are highly skewed to produce the result they want are ignored as is any attempt at error analysis to define the degree of accuracy of the methodology.

[Chew]

(because it is written in HB lore that you cannot transgress the inpassable Van Allen belts).

Some morph, some accrete, like the Van Allen Belts. At first it was the radiation would have given the astronauts an unacceptable risk of developing cancer, then it was they would have gotten sick and possibly died, then it was they would have been instantly killed. One HB went so far as to claim the spacecraft would have melted or exploded.

Each HB takes an erroneous claim of a previous HB and makes it just a little bit more dramatic but they're so stupid they don't know when to stop piling it on. The Latin term is "taurus cacas accretion. ", or TCA for short.