Moon Landing: Fake or Real?

[Cyberman]

What I haven't seen is a demonstration of why we can place such confidence on pictures that couldn't possible be tampered with. I don't know, I'm just making an observation.

I'm no expert, but I understand that photo editing software leaves telltale fingerprints in the coding of the image itself or something along those lines. But that doesn't even matter. What is it about the photos that would even require tampering? Diverging shadows? Airbrushed stars? Misplaced fill lighting?

The official conspiracy line is that the landing(s) was/were filmed on a studio set. As I've already mentioned, this would require a set to be built that doesn't simply look like a generic lunar landscape - hell, a good 90% of classic Doctor Who was filmed in a quarry - but actually simulates conditons on the Moon. In the first place it would have to be large enough that the depth of field would be correct. I'm using my mobile right now, but when I can I'll try to find the video footage of two astronauts moonwalking to a background mountain. If you just look at a still screenshot, the mountain appears like a small hill in the middle distance. As the video plays out, the true scale is revealed as the astronauts get smaller and smaller with distance.

Another video shows the LM taking off from the site and heading off to rendezvous with the CSM. The camera tilts to follow the vehicle. As the Hoax Believers have it, the module rises only so far before the camera can capture it bumping into the studio ceiling; unfortunately, the full footage shows the module continuing to rise, getting smaller as it does so, and arcing away to the horizon.

So, then, we are presented with a set so large it has no appreciable ceiling and can accomodate a mountain at something like half a mile from the camera. The film You Only Live Twice featured what was, for the mid sixties, the largest set ever built, to house the interior of Blofeld's volcano lair (the site is now occupied by the famous 007 soundstage) and could be seen from three miles away. Cinematographer Freddie Young expressed concerns that the set would be impossible to light properly; and they had the benefit of not having to worry about shadows - remember, multiple lights equals multiple shadows, not one shadow for each object in the frame, as the HB's want to assert.

So now we have a set larger than anything ever constructed, lit by a single primary source simulating the Sun, with the landscape itself acting as a reflective fill light. Analysis of every moving object in all the footage, from the astronauts themselves to every particle of dust, reveals that a) nothing moves until and unless touched by an astronaut and b) everything moves in a parabolic fashion, both indicating a vacuum and reduced gravity. So now our set needs to be in a decompression chamber, requiring technology that we still don't have in order to build one that large. All this also needs to be in an aircraft similar to the Vomit Comet, which can replicate such zero- and micro-gravity for training purposes (and in which, famously, the space scenes in the movie Apollo 13 were filmed, in about ten second bursts followed by equal periods of positive gravity as the aircraft performed the required parabolic manoeuvres). This needs, obviously, an aircraft large enough to accomodate the decompression chamber, its power source and equipment, the set and all its accessories, and also needs to be able to get off the ground at all, never mind fly and manoeuvre safely. ETA: Also, it would need to fly in such a way as to allow for filming at many minutes at a time, something the Vomit Comet cannot do.[/edit]

Quite apart from all that, we also have literally tons of lunar material that was brought back, not least of which was accidental dust contamination of the astronauts' suits. While HB's will point to the very real fact that Moon rocks in the form of meteorites have been retrieved from the Antarctic, what they don't tell you is that it was only due to the rocks brought back from the Moon that the meteorites were recognised as lunar in origin at all. Not to mention that the meteorite material shows clear evidence of having passed at speed through our atmosphere, which the material retrieved from the Moon does not.

Tell me when you want me to stop.