Moon Landings Again

Hi all,I've recently watched a documentary (highly biased, none of the allegations were allowed a rebuttal) in which I could explain all of the allegations except one. Cameras taken on the lunar surface had crosses etched on the lens, but photographs were produced where objects, equipment, even the astronauts themselves, partially obscured these crosses. Since they were etched on the lens they should appear on top of everything.Explanations?Mark

From one of the best Moon Hoax debunking sites, Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy: Bad TV :

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Bad: Crosshairs were etched in the astronauts' cameras to better help measure objects in the pictures. However, in several images, it looks like the objects are actually in front of the crosshairs, which is impossible if the crosshairs were inside the camera! Therefore, the images were faked.

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Good: This argument is pretty silly. Do the HBs think that NASA had painted crosshairs on the set behind the astronauts? I heard one HB claim the crosshairs were added later on, and NASA had messed up some of the imaging. That's ridiculous! Why add in crosshairs later? Cameras equipped with crosshairs have been used for a long time, and it would have been easy to simply use some to take pictures on the faked set. Clearly, the HBs are wrong here, but the images do look funny. What happened?

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What happened becomes clearer when you look more closely at the images. The times it looks like an object is in front of the crosshair (because the crosshair looks blocked by the object) is when the object photographed is white. The crosshair is black. Have you ever taken an image that is overexposed? White parts bleed into the film around them, making them look white too. That's all that happened here; the white object in the image ``fills in'' the black crosshair. It's a matter of contrast: the crosshair becomes invisible because the white part overwhelms the film. This is basic photography.

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{Note (added February 18, 2001): I have been informed by David Percy, a photographer quoted in the Fox show, that he does indeed believe that man went to the Moon, but he believes there are anomalies in the imagery taken which "put into question many aspects of the missions", which is a different matter. While I disagree that there are anomalies, I have edited out what is essentially a personal attack on Mr. Percy that I had here originally. It is an easy matter to let one's emotions get carried away when writing these essays, and I apologize to him and my readers for letting that get in. I make it a policy to correct Bad Astronomy based on facts, not personalities.}

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{Note added June 29, 2001: Again, Ian Goddard's work has more about this, including images that show how crosshairs can fade out in a bright background.}

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These crosses are called the Reseau grid, and the reason they seem to disappear in front of bright white areas is simply a result of using an optical film camera to capture an image at an overexposed setting; light from the bright white areas (reflections from objects, astronaut visors, the reflective gold foil on the lander, the highly reflective lunar surface) washes out the images and "bleeds" into the thin dark area that would normally be masked by the Reseau grid, causing it to disappear.I mean, obviously. Why would disappearing Reseau crosses indicate a hoaxed moon landing? I don't even understand the argument. Why would NASA paint crosses on the set and backdrops if they were supposed to look real? Why would they Photoshop (on time-traveling Macintoshes, I guess) crosses onto the image to fool the public when the public certainly had no expectation that lunar photos would include Reseau crosses?The point of the Reseau crosses was to provide a way to estimate angular distances using a precisely calibrated grid to be able to correct for lens angle and film distortion. There would be no need for the grid at all if these were simply faked publicity shots.If you scroll down to the bottom of this page you can see where the author is able to repeat the phenomenon with a similar kind of reference etching in a camera taking an image with high contrast.

From your link, I found alink to a site by Percy advocating the hoax conspiracy. I swear, if this is our beloved Percy, I will leave this forum for good.

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Owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have occasionally used the academic jargon generator to produce phrases that even I don't fully understand. The jargons are not meant to offend anyone or to insult anyone's intelligence!

Thanks everyone!

oh pleeze - the moon landings are clearly faked - this site shows how:http://stuffucanuse.com/fake_moon_landings/moon_landings.htmEdited by CK, : type - I think the "moan landings" is a slightly different type of event....

I'm not clear on what you are referring to. What do you mean by "crosses etched on the lens?"Although I've never been a moon landing hoaxer, I used to have a few questions about the validity of certain aspects, much like yourself here.First, during the initial and famous step on the moon, you see the astronauts coming off of the craft. Obviously the camera angle could have been coming from the craft itself. But then immediately following, you see several different camera angles, and more importantly, cameras away from the craft itself.So I asked, well how did the camera get there, with different panning sequences, if they just arrived? Obviously, it was not a shot of continuous film. They set up a camera in the distance. But where then are the footprints? They must have used remote cameras.The second little conundrum was from a shot of an astronaut planting the US flag. The flag was waiving in no oxygen, i.e., no wind?I'm still unclear about this one, but I suspect with such low gravity, its really just a rippling effect and not actually waiving in the air.But, you can tell its not blowing in the wind. The flag is physically behaving in a total foreign way to us, because we are used to so much more gravity. This, I believe, accounts for the anomaly.Check here to see your question is reasonable answered. Edited by Nemesis Juggernaut, : No reason given.

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“This life’s dim windows of the soul, distorts the heavens from pole to pole, and goads you to believe a lie, when you see with and not through the eye.” -William Blake

The photos taken by the lunar missions had a distinctive reference grid superimposed on the image called a "Reseau grid", this was done not by etching the lens, actually, but by the camera incorporating a marked glass plate directly over the film surface. The results look something like this: The flag isn't waving in the wind; the flag is hanging from a horizontal support rod, and the whole thing is pretty light aluminum so it's shaking in the astronaut's grip. Right, that's from a camera mounted on one of the lander's struts and pointed at the hatch and ladder. Immediately, like a jump cut? Editing, NJ. I doubt you've seen every minute of the Apollo 11 mission, you've seen the highlights edited together.

Ah, thanks. Yes, I know exactly what that is. Right. I was just listing things that stumped me in the past.Even supposing all those things couldn't be explained, the conspiracy theorists would really have to wonder how NASA was able to mimic zero gravity in the 60's. Its not like they had available to them all of the movie magic we have today.Apparently, they overlook all of that, and instead, focus on minor details that really don't present too much of a problem to begin with.

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“This life’s dim windows of the soul, distorts the heavens from pole to pole, and goads you to believe a lie, when you see with and not through the eye.” -William Blake

Not to mention the clincher - Apollo 11 left behind a rangefinding retroreflector - essentially, a mirror that always reflects light back to where it came from, like the safety reflectors on bicycles - that anybody with a powerful enough laser can "ping" and rangefind the moon.So how'd that get there if there was no moon landing? (That's a rhetorical question.) It turns out that this, as a rhetorical technique, is bound to fool enough rubes to make it worthwhile. See also - creationism and Holocaust denial.

It's going to appal coming generations that, at a time when the original Apollo astronauts were still walking around, we put crackpots on the air and asked them the moon questions._____________Edited by Archer Opterix, : html.