Did we land on the moon?

Yes, of course. There are however, some people (not many) who do believe it was a hoax, but then some people are prepared to believe just about anything! Maybe it's because they saw the TV program "Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?"

Let's now move on to explain why all the reasons people believe it was a hoax are wrong. You do not need to be a rocket scientist to see the obvious errors in their arguments. In most cases common sense is all you need. But first, let's get something out of the way.

Photographic 'evidence'
Let's just take a look at some photographs that demonstrate how these errors arise. I cannot include them all, otherwise this page would take a week to load, but these silly claims come up time after time.

A) NASA forgot to paint the stars in the sky.
It is very popular with the hoax believers, but I can't understand why though, it's so easy to prove for you. I think it tells us something very important about the way they think.

Look mum! No stars, NASA forgot to paint them in!

The real reason is that when contrasted with the brightness of the astronauts and the lunar surface, the stars are just too dim to register on the photographic emulsion of the camera film. If the camera shutter were held open long enough for the stars to register, everything else would be over-exposed into a white featureless glare. You cannot have both visible on the one photograph, so the camera was set for the correct exposure for Buzz Aldrin and the lunar surface, not the stars. When standing on the lunar surface the astronauts could not visually observe the stars in the dark sky, because of the surface glare, they could only see them when standing in shadow. By the same token, if we take a photograph outdoors at night from a brightly illuminated surface, our photograph also would not show any stars in the sky.

I have been 'informed' (now that's a joke) by hoax believers that NASA were unable to reproduce the stars in their correct positions as seen from the moon, (being much too complicated a task for stupid NASA to calculate) so rather than get it wrong and risk being found out decided to leave them out. Ho ho ho hohoho! This argument is soooo ignorant of the facts! The stars are much too far away for any difference to be visible over the tiny distance of 250,000 miles from the earth to the moon. Take a photograph of the stars from earth, then six months later take another photograph. In this time span the earth will have shifted the maximum distance from one side of its orbit around the sun to the other, around 186,000,000 miles. Only a couple of the very nearest stars will be seen to have shifted against the background stars (this apparent shift is due to parallax) and even then, the shift is very small and is only perceptible by comparing the two photos very carefully.

Anyway, no need to take my word for it is there, I could be part of the conspiracy according to your way of thinking. Just pop outside one night and try to photograph the stars with a brightly illuminated object in the foreground. Try it, its easy enough to prove without the need of a massive conspiracy theory, just you and a camera is all that is required.

Case closed.

B) The Great Flag Waving
I just love this one, very nearly as much as the 'no stars ' one. Below is one of the pictures in question.

Neil and Aldrin deploy a U.S. flag on the Moon in 1969

The flag is held out in the unfurled position by an extendable rod running through the top of the flag, so that it can be viewed unfurled, and you can see the unnatural rigidity this gives to the top of the flag in the picture. The rod creates the effect of a breeze blowing the flag into that position. Without the supporting rod the flag would just hang limply down and would not reveal the stars and stripes. Flags are designed to be blown into position by the wind on Earth, so the support was added to replicate this, as there is no atmosphere on the Moon. The rod is not extended the full width of the flag and it looks like a breeze is causing a ripple in the flag.
It has also been claimed that some video clips show the flag waving in the breeze when it was planted. Not so. The movement of the flag is only because when astronauts were planting the flagpole they rotated it back and forth to better penetrate the lunar soil. Without an atmosphere it takes a while for this movement to damp down. There is not one video clip showing the flag moving when the astronauts are not holding it, a fact never mentioned by the hoax believers.
Do you really think that an errant breeze blowing through the set causing the flag to wave in what was supposed to be a total vacuum would not have been noticed? Such an obvious fact could not escape the notice of an entire film crew, besides which they would surely have called upon the services of experts to oversee operations to guard against this very sort of 'error'. They would simply have done another take.
Case closed.

C) The same background appears in two different locations
This one I feel is especially stupid. Almost deserving of a special award for supreme ignorance and lack of even the most basic common sense. How anyone can take this claim seriously is beyond me, they must be the village idiot!

Photos taken by the Apollo 15 crew

The photos above are the two most commonly used in support of this truly pathetic argument. The poor confused hoax believers claim that as the Lunar Module is only visible in one photo, it must show two different locations where NASA used the same fake backdrop twice. Pardon me while I fall off my chair laughing!
I would have thought it obvious that it is only necessary to move a short distance to one side and then point the camera at the same hills to remove the LM from the picture while still keeping the distant background almost exactly the same. I say 'almost' the same, because even though the hills are far away, they do move just a little, as can be seen in the two photos. The hills we can see are in fact more than 3 miles distant from the Lunar Module 'Falcon'. The astronauts were only able to reach them to gather rock samples because they used the lunar rover to make the journey. By moving say 50 or 100 feet to one side, the distant hills 3 miles away will appear to alter hardly at all, but the LM will no longer be in the frame, and that is exactly what we think.
Case closed.

All the other 'fake' photographs are explained just as easily with a little knowledge, and an understanding of how conditions on the Moon are very different to those here. With no atmosphere to scatter the light, things look a little odd on the Moon, we have a very black sky and a very bright surface. We see strong shadows everywhere, and our sense of distance is also fooled because there is no atmosphere to produce the familiar atmospheric haze that creates a distance perspective on Earth. Furthermore, with the gravity being only a sixth of Earth's gravity, things move and behave differently as well. It's hard to make straight comparisons, because we cannot, the Moon is just not like the Earth. We have to think differently when interpreting the images from the Moon, and that's what causes the problems, people are not allowing for those differences when looking at the lunar photographs. They are looking at them as if they were taken under normal Earth conditions, and concluding wrongly that there must be something wrong with the photographs. There isn't!



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