NASA photographic record of Manned Moonlanding:Is there evidence of fabrication?

[ChrLz]

Lens distortion (also called "barrel distortion") is not what causes parallel lines in reality to appear non-parallel in a photograph
Barrel distortion causes straight lines near the edges of the field of view to appear bent...
... and it really only applies to wide angle lenses. I would not consider the 53° field of view of the Apollo lunar surface cameras to be "wide angle"

I'm going to nit pick a little here...  Given how perspective works, any 'straight' line that is not the one you have centred in your field of view (be it your eye or *any* lens) IS curved.  The further from the centreline* of your field of view, the more curved it is.

For both lenses and your eye, it is relatively easy to correct this effect IF and ONLY if your field of view is limited, eg out to about 90 degrees f-o-v (that figure is highly arguable).  In lenses, the barrel and pincushion discrepancies are what are left over from the designers choices on how to create a rectilinear lens, ie one that corrects for the actual, real, not illusional, bending that happens for everything above/below (and left/right) of the centre of view.  As Smartcooky said, it is normally only a problem for lenses that are very wide angle, but that is *only* because lens designers do devious things to twist the image into a roughly rectilinear form when it is projected onto the sensor/film.  Once you get to the very wide (fish eye) lenses, they basically have to give up and accept that it cannot be done. 

Interestingly, for those of us who do panoramas by stitching lots of images together, this rectilinear correction probably creates more trouble than it solves.. and we have to learn about this stuff as the perspective issues become quite problematic.  We have the inverse problem that mapmakers have, as it were, when they have to flatten the globe.  Think about it.. 

Your eye has an easier job of it - the eye does actually see a very fish eyed world, but you have a brain that takes care of that and straightens everything in some very, very clever ways.  It sort of *has* to, as you know the lines are straight, and they shouldn't bend..  so the brain simply makes it so...

This perspective issue, which is simply caused by us being effectively a single point in space around which a spherical universe exists, also explains the Moon Tilt Illusion (it's not an illusion!) where the Moon can be (and often is) clearly illuminated from way above the horizon even after the Sun has set, also anti- crepuscular rays, also the way railway lines bend outwards under your feet and then converge at the vanishing points.  Straight lines CANNOT do that, yet they do - from a single point perspective.  Anyway, I have a bit of a bee in my bonnet about this perspective issue - at BAUT long ago I largely unsuccessfully argued this, and some erudite members there (Hi Grapes..) pretty much ran me off the thread, wrongly claiming that straight lines must always appear straight.

It's a bit offtopic, but I'm very happy to elaborate in great (painful) detail, including a pretty simple elegant mathematical proof (all you need is you standing near a fence, and some trigonometry...)  If this subject interests you, see this link from someone else who gets it and explains it well using the moon tilt thing...


* I've done a bit of simplifying here, I hope any perspective purists will forgive me for trying to simplify.

[Tedward]

I would like to thank Romulus, as ever I learn something new from the replies. Still not read them all yet as it escalated quite quickly.

[onebigmonkey]

Your eye has an easier job of it - the eye does actually see a very fish eyed world, but you have a brain that takes care of that and straightens everything in some very, very clever ways.  It sort of *has* to, as you know the lines are straight, and they shouldn't bend..  so the brain simply makes it so...

My brain currently sees a very fish-eyed world - I've just got varifocals, and lines I previously considered extremely straight (sides of a computer screen, my guitar neck and so on) turn out to be very very curved indeed!

[Dr.Acula]

I have mixed feelings on current hoaxies. It is good thing that moon hoax is dying except for the few die hards who are not very convincing. The good thing about hoaxies is that their claims spark interesting conversations and I hope that some people come here to find the truth about hoax claims and get inspired about space. I know I did.

I have had some interest in space all my life but searching the answer for David Percy's glinting wires brought me to Clavius and ApolloHoax on Proboards and I have been lurking ever since  To pat myself on back, I recognized PLSS antenna immediately but remained baffled about flashes near the top of the picture.

Romulus was really bad show. All those promises about evidence and scientific approach dwindled down to ad hominems, delusions of superiority and bad analogies not to mention the other blunders which were too technical for me to spot. I know there is Ektachrome and wondered about partially developing film. I had no idea that Ektachrome was positive film (I'm not much of a photographer...).

During the last few days I have been twice outside while it was raining and didn't get wet. First time I used underground access tunnel from my work place to parking garage and drove home. The second time it was snowing outside and my clothing was slippery enough that snow didn't cling.

Lurky

edit: added signature

Hello, Lurky, greetings from Germany.

You're absolutely right, the hoax is dying. You can see it on several forums (eeehm fora? don't know the pluralform  ). When one of these die hards comes up, he can only present old and long debunked nonsense.

You've got to know, I was one of them. Not a die hard, but I believed in the hoax. But at one time I realized, that there is nothing really convincing. I did my own research, something that most of the HB never do. I didn't want to parrot all the old points, so I tried to find the real thing, the absolute and undeniable proof. I did my calculations, my research. I looked for help from real experts. And they showed me, how wrong I was. Shortly after this I realized, how dishonest most of the HB's are. I've got a good example here in Germany. And I decided, that I don't want to have a liar on my side.

To make it short, two or three years ago I found some interesting science fora and I found Jay's clavius site. I've learned so many things about spaceflight, the history of Apollo, physics and other very important things. It's incredible and it's enjoyable to get this knowledge.

[JayUtah]

My profession is manufacturing, or better to say developin, bobsleighs and luges.

We probably have a lot more in common then.  I don't manufacture directly, but I often have to work closely with manufacturing engineers to work out fabrication and assembly problems.

In English we prefer "bobsled" to "bobsleigh."  While you won't cause confusion, English generally prefers "sled" when the vehicle descends by gravity and "sleigh" when it is drawn by an animal.  Technically I guess you could say it's a bobsleigh until they stop pushing it and get in. Then it's a bobsled.

I'm glad you liked being in my city, although I imagine you probably spend most of your time up at Bear Hollow, where the track is.  You might be interested to know that the area across the highway from it has been built up a lot since the Games.  We're quite proud of that track.  The public can ride it with a trained pilot, but it's $185 per person so I would have to save up.  They even do it during the summer with a wheeled "sled." ($75)

[JayUtah]

Interestingly, for those of us who do panoramas by stitching lots of images together, this rectilinear correction probably creates more trouble than it solves.

Undoubtedly, because the gimmicks (especially in the Biogon) that push all the distortion to the edges are generally not linear or even second-order corrections.  That makes it practically impossible to design a one-size-fits-all algorithm to rectify the image.  However, for professional applications, you can build a lens model.  Basically you photograph a special pattern from a fixed, very precisely measured, distance with the optical axis very precisely centered on the center of the pattern, and where specific lines on the pattern fall in the image can tell certain software exactly how light refracts through the lens.  That can be used later where a precise rectification is needed.  It's a more rigorous, more precise version of the same process lens manufacturers use to plot the distortion curves for the lens's data sheet.

We have the inverse problem that mapmakers have, as it were, when they have to flatten the globe.  Think about it.

I have a whole pile of software recipes (somewhere...) for implementing cartographic projections.  But yes, it's a similar problem.  Only harder, because the resulting cartograph doesn't strictly have to be a rectangle.  I even ran across one that mimics the celestial sphere as seen from the ground.  At elevation zero, the azimuth lines are vertical and parallel.  As elevation increases, the azimuths converge until at elevation 90° the azimuth lines are radials.

Your eye has an easier job of it - the eye does actually see a very fish eyed world, but you have a brain that takes care of that and straightens everything in some very, very clever ways.

One of those ways is the concept of the eyespan.  While your eye sees a surprisingly wide field of view, physiologically it's most sensitive near its optical axis.  And cognitively, your brain applies certain interpretive processes only to that eyespan -- roughly a 30° cone in the center of your vision.  Any profession that has to do with clear perception takes care to keep things within the eyespan.  This, for example, is why typography still uses narrow text columns and why heads-up displays are still small.  Typographers learned that the eye has a hard time finding the next line of type when the column is wider than the eyespan.

But in terms of perspective what it means is that your mind doesn't spend a lot of time trying to build spatial coherence at the edge of your vision, probably because if it did you'd have lots of headaches.

[JayUtah]

One VERY interesting point which Jay queried Romulus on: if the lens distortion explains unparalleled shadows on earth based photos, why can it not also explain lunar based photos. An interesting precedence that Romulus has created for us.

Well, it's hard to guess sometimes at what hoax believers think the world should be like, especially in one so addled as Romulus.  But what I think he was trying to say is that the shadows are "wrong" in Apollo photos as an unavoidable consequence of how they were lit.  Then in order to pretend to recreate those same shadows on Earth in sunlight, we need special lenses fabricated exactly for the purpose of producing these fake proof photos and useful for nothing else.  Rather than the expected effects of wide-angle lenses that you and I consider, I gather he was pleading a very specific case -- lenses made for no purpose other than forging Apollo-like photos.  Not just "lens distortion as from an ordinary lens," but "lenses specifically designed to distort the picture in sunlight exactly the way Apollo shadows are distorted by the use of stage lighting."

Keep in mind, that's an argument coming from someone who tells the world that NASA spends millions of dollars opposing only him.

Yes, if you're thinking about ordinary distortion, then sun-cast shadows cast on Earth would be distorted the same way as sun-cast shadows on the Moon.  But if you're proposing a one-off lens made just to correct specific effects, why can't NASA then have produced a special one-off lens to make the stage shadows look "parallel?"  They can fabricate exotic lenses to try to fool Romulus, but they can't fabricate exotic lenses to avoid the problem altogether?  See how that's just another egoist argument?

[gillianren]

And I can't imagine (argument from incredulity, I know, but this ties in to the very small amount of physics I actually learned in that ill-fated physics class) that it's possible to manufacture a lens that would only distort the shadows.

[JayUtah]

And I can't imagine (argument from incredulity, I know, but this ties in to the very small amount of physics I actually learned in that ill-fated physics class) that it's possible to manufacture a lens that would only distort the shadows.

Not optically.  You can have lenses that selectively distort small areas of the field of view.  Such a lens would have elements with specific lumps, despressions, or other visible discontinuity.  The effect would be similar to using a "stretch" tool in an image-editing software program.  And actually, those are exactly the methods used to distort models in fashion photography to produce those unachievable results.  A few weeks ago there was a tizzy when Justin Bieber's unedited photos for Calvin Klein surfaced.  Such effects could theoretically be achieved optically by a lens manufactured solely for that photograph.  (Now the one-off lens for Lawrence of Arabia doesn't seem so outrageous.)  But that lens would need a plethora of small-scale alterations on its surfaces to selectively "barrel" or "pincushion" very small areas of the field of view.

So the best you could hope for in the 1960s would be an optical alteration of the region of the photo to "stretch" everything in it, including the shadows, to make it appear to lie in some other direction.  But in the context of proposing special propagandist lenses, we're really just quibbling over degrees of absurdity.

Is there a way optically to redirect only the relative absence of light (i.e., a shadow) along a different path through a camera?  Or more physically accurate:  is there a way to redirect only the portions of strong light surrounding the shadow so as to undetectably redirect the appearance of where the shadow lies?  Not bloody likely.  We know several ways to redirect light preferentially based on its wavelength.  (In fact it happens in lenses whether we want it or not -- usually not.)  But not how to move shadows with lenses.

[Luke Pemberton]

They can fabricate exotic lenses to try to fool Romulus, but they can't fabricate exotic lenses to avoid the problem altogether?

Or why just not just shoot it knowing that shadows aren't always parallel? I just don't get the overly convoluted scenarios with the Apollo surface photography and the need for special lenses. Is this a case of Occam's razor?

I can sort of understand falling for the fill light claims with photos such as Aldrin descending from the LM, but parallel shadows and multiple light sources push the boundaries beyond what is reasonable. The latter are so easily debunkable and anyone that leans on them as evidence despite obvious evidence to the contrary really is just looking for a fight.

[Luke Pemberton]

And I can't imagine (argument from incredulity, I know, but this ties in to the very small amount of physics I actually learned in that ill-fated physics class) that it's possible to manufacture a lens that would only distort the shadows.

I'd say that was an argument from common sense and practical experience of observing the world around you.

[Dr.Acula]

We probably have a lot more in common then.  I don't manufacture directly, but I often have to work closely with manufacturing engineers to work out fabrication and assembly problems.

In English we prefer "bobsled" to "bobsleigh."  While you won't cause confusion, English generally prefers "sled" when the vehicle descends by gravity and "sleigh" when it is drawn by an animal.  Technically I guess you could say it's a bobsleigh until they stop pushing it and get in. Then it's a bobsled.

I'm glad you liked being in my city, although I imagine you probably spend most of your time up at Bear Hollow, where the track is.  You might be interested to know that the area across the highway from it has been built up a lot since the Games.  We're quite proud of that track.  The public can ride it with a trained pilot, but it's $185 per person so I would have to save up.  They even do it during the summer with a wheeled "sled." ($75)

I was there the whole event, from the opening ceremony until the closing ceremony. So I had time enough to get some impressions of your city. And I have to say, it was very interesting. Maybe I should visit it again per streetview.

I know this special difference between "sleigh" and "sled" But we use the term, which the IOC use either (sleigh), for example in our documents and correspondence. Our international federation is the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation. So you understand, why I use sleigh every time

I've done a public ride in Germany (at Oberhof in Thuringia). It was a two-men-model with the professional pilot Christoph Langen (who won gold in Salt Lake City). I didn't have to pay for it, because it was important for me to have this special experience. And man, I can tell you, you should do it  Surely you will s*** your pants before the first curve, but at the end it's a really fantastic thing.

[smartcooky]

The issue here is that distortion in the optical systems of lens has nothing whatsoever to do with why shadows that are parallel in real life, appear non-parallel in a photograph. I concur with ChrLz when he says that all lines off the centre x and y axes are curved to some degree, but this is generally undetectable in lenses with less than about a 70° FoV, and certainly would not be easy to detect in the Apollo lens..

Assuming that the two objects casting the shadows are both vertical (w.r.t. with the X axis of the photo) and the surface on which the shadows are being cast is flat and horizontal (w.r.t. the Y axis of the photo) then the degree to which the two parallel shadows appear non-parallel depends on how far away the foreground and background shadows are relative to each other and relative to the point of view, as well as the distance that the point of view is away from the plane of the surface on which the shadows are cast.



I have used American Football yardage lines to show this because they are evenly spaced and we KNOW that in reality, they are all parallel with each other. The distant (background) ones appear to be parallel with the X axis while the nearer (foreground) ones do not. In fact, the background ones are not parallel with the X axis either, they only appear that way because the angle (above the plane) that we view them from is so low that we cannot detect the difference. However, the angle we view the foreground ones from is much higher so the can easily see they are not parallel.

The important thing however, is that this does not only happen in a photo. Of you go and stand on the corner of a football field you will see this effect with your own eyes. Your brain corrects for this and tells you that the lines are parallel in 3D space but that is not what you actually see.

I reiterate; when lines that are in reality parallel, appear to be non-parallel on a photograph, it has nothing to do what what happens in the camera or the lens or any other piece of optical or photographic equipment. It has to do with one, and only one thing, perspective, which is the consequence of trying to display three dimensional space in two dimensions. When you do so, you lose a dimension, so there is a compromise; the third dimension is displayed as a distortion in either or both of the remaining dimensions.

[Al Johnston]

I know this special difference between "sleigh" and "sled" But we use the term, which the IOC use either (sleigh), for example in our documents and correspondence. Our international federation is the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation. So you understand, why I use sleigh every time

To be fair, the difference may be more adhered to in American English than the Queen's variety, which prefers "sledge" to "sled" anyway

[Bob B.]

Smartcooky, your photos and explanation is excellent.  To illustrate the point further I created the following drawing, which shows how the shadow cast by a cube changes with different angles of view (from overhead to side view).  The rocks in the foreground of image AS14-68-9486 are viewed from approximately the middle perspective while the LM is viewed from approximately the bottom perspective.



Furthermore, as I indicated here, I believe the LM's shadow may be projected onto a slight uphill incline, as seen in AS14-66-9276.  Adding this incline into the illustration, we get something like this:



So even though the shadow is in fact angled about 45 degrees toward the direction of the camera, it give the impression that it is projected to the right.