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This is a sub-article to Apollo Moon Landing hoax theories

The examination of Apollo Moon photographs is an endeavor undertaken by people engaged in the debate as to the merits of Apollo Moon Landing hoax theories. A number of allegations and refutations with a variable degree of notability are put forward due to this examination.

Allegations and refutations

There are no stars in any of the photos

Hoax proponents frequently point out that there are no stars in the photographs.^[1] Yuri Gagarin (who made one orbit of the Earth in 1961) commented that the stars were astonishingly brilliant (see the external link below). Hoax proponents say that NASA chose not to put the stars into the photos because astronomers would have been able to use them to determine whether the photos were taken from the Earth or the Moon, by means of identifying them and comparing their celestial position and parallax to what would be expected for either observation site.

Zarya from the Space Shuttle, no stars visible

Mir, no stars visible observing The Moon and Mir from the Space Shuttle Discovery

Long-exposure photo taken from the surface of the Moon by Apollo 16 using a special ultraviolet camera. It shows the Earth with the correct background of stars.

UV photo with some stars labeled

• Stars are also never seen in Space Shuttle, Mir, International Space Station Earth observation photos, or even sporting events that take place at night. The sun in the Earth/Moon area shines as brightly as on a clear noon day on Earth, so cameras used for imaging these things are set for daylight exposure, with quick shutter speeds in order to prevent overexposing the film. The dim light of the stars simply does not have a chance to expose the film. (This effect can be demonstrated on Earth by attempting to view stars from a brightly lit parking lot at night. Only a few of the brightest stars are visible, and shielding the eye with one's hands only marginally improves the view. Science fiction movies and television shows do confuse this issue by depicting stars as visible in space under all lighting conditions. A photographic demonstration of how aperture and shutter speed can turn a lit background ink-black is here. The eye's visual response is much the same.) Stars were seen by every Apollo mission crew except for the unfortunate Apollo 13 (they couldn't see the stars due to the fact that oxygen and water vapor created a haze around the spacecraft). Stars were used for navigation purposes and were occasionally also seen through cabin windows when the conditions allowed. To see stars, nothing lit by sunlight could be in the viewer's field of view.^[2]

• Stars are not dramatically brighter in space (above the Earth's atmosphere). Professional astronomer and two-time space shuttle astronaut Ronald A. Parise stated that he could barely see stars at all from space. He had to turn out all of the lights in the shuttle to even glimpse the stars.^[3]

• Payload restrictions made the transport of telescope facilities to the Moon unfeasible, and without these ordinary stellar photography would have served no (scientific) purpose. However, even without such facilities, the Moon does offer several advantages as an observation platform. The near-absence of an atmosphere means that stellar imaging is possible at many wavelengths which are not visible from Earth. Long-exposure photos were taken with a special far-ultraviolet camera by Apollo 16 astronauts on April 21, 1972 from the surface of the Moon. (The second photo has some stars labeled.) Some of these photos show the Earth with stars from the Capricornus and Aquarius constellations in the background. The joint Belgium/UK./Holland satellite TD-1 later scanned the sky for stars that are bright in UV light. The TD-1 data obtained with the shortest passband is a close match for the Apollo 16 photographs.^[4]

Original Apollo 14 photo

Enhancement of photos showing Venus

• The ability to determine parallax is limited by the angular resolution of the instrument used. The most advanced dedicated experiment carried out to date—the Hipparcos satellite—achieved resolutions in the milliarcsecond range. Using as baseline the diameter of the Earth's orbit about the Sun (by comparing images taken six months apart), this allowed parallax measurements for stars out to a distance of approximately 1,000 parsecs. However, the distance from Earth to Moon is about a thousand times smaller than that baseline, which means that the detection limit is reduced to about 1 parsec. This is less than the distance to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri. Considering further that the resolution of an image taken with a conventional camera is many times lower than Hipparcos's, any such determination is entirely ruled out.

• Although stars would not normally be visible to the naked eye during daylight, whether from the Earth, the Moon, or on orbit, the planet Venus (which is much brighter than any of the stars) was actually recorded on film by astronaut Alan Shepard at the conclusion of his second extravehicular activity, during the Apollo 14 mission. Shepard was preparing to ascend the ladder to re-enter the lunar module Antares, when he likely noticed Venus shining brightly next to the crescent Earth. He made a series of photographs with his chest-mounted Hasselblad camera, likely all at 1/250th second exposure, and differing f-stops. Owing to its position closer to the Sun and its complete coverage by clouds, Venus has a higher surface brightness than Earth, and is indeed visible to the unaided eye in broad daylight from Earth, given a sufficiently transparent sky. It would have been plainly visible to Shepard in the lunar sky, and easily recorded on film. For a complete explanation, consult the "Images" section of the Apollo 14 Lunar Surface Journal.^[5]

• In the Apollo 11 press conference, Neil Armstrong states that he was "never able to see stars from the lunar surface or on the daylight side of the moon by eye" ^[6] Stars were visible with the naked eye only when they were in the shadow of the Moon. All of the landings were in daylight.^[7]

The color and angle of shadows and light are inconsistent

Apollo 14 photo showing shadows in different directions because of the terrain, examined by the Mythbusters

The shadows should be absolutely black and run parallel to each other.^[8]

• Shadows on the Moon are complicated because there are several light sources: the Sun, the Earth, and the Moon itself, as well as the astronauts and the Lunar Module.^[9] Light from these sources is scattered by lunar dust in many different directions, including into shadows. Additionally, the Moon's surface is not flat and shadows falling into craters and hills appear longer, shorter and distorted from the simple expectations of the hoax believers. More significantly, perspective effects come into play, particularly on rough or angled ground.^[10] This leads to non-parallel shadows even on objects which are extremely close to each other, and can be observed easily on Earth wherever fences or trees are found. And finally, the camera in use was fitted with a wide angle lens, which naturally resulted in subtle versions of "fish eye" distortion.^[11]

Apparent "hot spots" in some photographs

Aldrin on ladder, "hot spot" on the heel of his right boot.

Hoax proponents claim this looks like a huge spotlight was used at a close distance.^[12] In an Apollo 12 voice recording astronaut Pete Conrad said "That Sun's bright, it's like somebody is shining a spotlight on your hands! I tell you...it really is. It's like somebody's got a super-bright spotlight!" Of one photo of Aldrin, Jan Lundberg, engineer at Hasselblad and responsible for producing the photographic cameras used in Apollo EVA missions, stated "Yes, it seems like he is standing in a spotlight and I can't explain that. Umm, that escapes me... why?. So maybe you have to find Armstrong and ask him."

• Conrad is talking about the Sun.
• Lunar dust reflects light in a manner similar to street signs or wet grass - a significant amount of light is reflected back at the light source (the Sun in this case) instead of being scattered in all directions as Earth sand would do.^[13] This can be observed on Earth, as it explains why the full Moon is much more than twice as bright as a half Moon.^[14] This effect explains hot spots in photos that contain the photographer's own shadow.
• The sunlit portion of Armstrong's spacesuit is in the correct place to provide the light for the hotspot in the photo of Aldrin on the ladder.
• The "hot spots" are discussed at Clavius.org.^[15]

Issues with crosshairs in photos

There are some issues with crosshairs that were etched onto the Reseau plate of the cameras.

1998 scan

1998 scan enlargement - crosshair bleeds out

2004 scan

2004 scan enlargement - crosshair visible

a) In some photos, the crosshairs (fiducials) appear to be behind objects, rather than in front of them where they should be, as if the photos were altered.^{[16 ]}

• In photography, the light white color (the object behind the crosshair) makes the black object (the crosshair) invisible due to saturation effects in the film emulsion. The film particles that ought to have been black were exposed by light from the adjacent brightly lit particles.^[17] Ironically, this saturation effect would not happen if the crosshairs were drawn on in post, and so is evidence of genuine photos. Attempting to alter photos that already have crosshairs would make the compositing process far more difficult.

The 'classic' Aldrin photo, with reticules not centered.

b) In the 'classic' Aldrin photo, the reticle (etched crosshair on the camera) is too low. Since the crosshairs are in a fixed position on all the images, a lower reticle on this image indicates that the image has been cropped. This is the case even on the 70mm duplicate transparency NASA issues. The 70mm transparencies should show the entire 'full' image. Hoax proponents say that the only explanation for this is if the original full transparency needed to be cropped because of an embarrassing artifact like a piece of stage scenery was in the shot.^{[16 ]}

Buzz Aldrin, original photo

• The view of the actual photo below, (at right) (source: AS11-40-5903 or AS11-40-5903 high resolution) is chopped off just above Aldrin, cutting off Aldrin's antenna (except for a small piece). Duplicate transparencies are not necessarily exact copies of the original. The publicly-released version of the photo was cropped and recomposed by NASA within hours of the film being made available, with extra black space added at the top of most released versions for what NASA calls aesthetic reasons. This Web page has NASA's history of the photo.

c) In other photos, the reticules are not in a straight line, or appear in the 'wrong' place, indicating that the photo has been doctored.^[18]

• The debunking Web site Clavius.org explains that the methodologies that the conspiracy theorists propose for doctoring the photos with "wrong" reticules are often contradictory and generally require absurd lengths to explain the "inconsistencies" when there are reasonable explanations. In particular, prints were often cropped and rotated, which causes the illusion of reticules occurring off-center or "not straight".

Apollo 12 astronaut

Slightly different photo, makes it appear that the crosshairs have changed

Identical backgrounds in photos taken miles apart

There are issues with photos listed as being taken miles apart having identical backgrounds.

Apollo 15 Lunar Module

Later photo with same hills in the background

• Detailed comparison of the backgrounds said to be identical in fact show significant changes in the relative positions of the hills that are consistent with the claimed locations that the images were taken from. Parallax effects clearly demonstrate that the images were taken from widely different locations around the landing sites.

Claims that the appearance of the background is identical while the foreground changes (for example, from a boulder strewn crater to the Lunar Module) are trivially explained when the images were taken from nearby locations, akin to seeing distant mountains appearing the same on Earth from locations that are hundreds of feet apart showing different foreground items.

Furthermore, as there is no atmosphere on the Moon, very distant objects will appear clearer and closer to the human eye. What appears as nearby hills in some photographs, are actually mountains several kilometers high and some 10-20 kilometers away. Changes in such very distant backgrounds are quite subtle, and can be mistaken for no change at all.

As the Moon is also much smaller than the Earth, the horizon is significantly nearer in photographs than Earthbound observers are used to seeing (an eye 1.7 m above completely flat ground will see the horizon 4.7 km away on Earth, but only 2.4 km away on the Moon). This can lead to confusing interpretations of the images.^[19]

One specific case is debunked in Who Mourns For Apollo? (PDF part 1) and Who Mourns For Apollo? (PDF part 2) by Mike Bara.

• While it is true that there is no haze to assist in judging distance, the maximum distance to the horizon is much closer than on Earth, due to the smaller size of the Moon. This limits the scope for the same objects to appear in different shots taken miles apart.

For a flat area of the Moon, the distance to horizon ≈ sqrt ( 2 * radius of moon * height of observer )^[20]

The Moon's average radius is 1,080 miles, and let's assume generously that the astronauts held the camera 5 feet, or 0.000947 miles above the surface (the cameras are shown in photographs as having no viewfinder, and the astronauts seem to hold them in the centre of their chest, so five feet is generous).

These figures give distance = sqrt (2 * 1080 * 0.000947) = 2 miles.

It seems that this would be far enough for terrain features to appear in shots taken from locations some distance apart, but perhaps not "miles apart". Without having specific information as to which shots and the terrain they are purported to contain, there is no definite answer.

The high number of photographs

When the total number of official photographs taken during EVA of all Apollo missions is divided by the total amount of time of all EVAs, one arrives at 1.19 photos per minute. That is one photo per 50 seconds. Discounting time spent on other activities results in one photo per 15 seconds for Apollo 11. This is even more remarkable considering that many locations in the photographs are situated miles apart and would have taken considerable travel time, especially in bulky pressure suits. On top of this, the cameras were neither equipped with a viewfinder nor with automatic exposure control, which means that taking good pictures would take considerably longer.

Map of photos taken during Apollo 11 moonwalk

• The astronauts were well trained before the mission in the use of photographic equipment. Since there were no weather effects to contend with and the bright sunlight scenes permitted the use of small apertures with consequent large depth of field, the equipment was generally kept at a single setting for the duration of the mission. All that was required of the astronauts was to open the shutter and wind the film to take a picture.

In these conditions it is possible to take two photographs a second at best. The camera was in a bracket mounted on the front of their spacesuit, so they looked straight ahead at what they wanted to photograph; no viewfinder was needed. Also, many of the photographs were stereoscopic pairs or sets of panoramic images, taken immediately after each other. The Apollo Image Atlas (external link below) shows that 70mm magazine 40/S of Apollo 11 has 121 photos taken during the walk on the surface—less than one per minute. In addition, by looking at the photographs in sequence, one can see that very often several of them were taken in rapid succession. Here is a list of Apollo 11 surface photos (AS11-40-5850 to AS11-40-5970). As can be seen from the map, many photos were taken from a similar position.

The quality of the photographs

Underexposed photo of Armstrong on the Moon (lower left)

Given the lack of time and viewfinders, the photos look much better than would be expected, with perfect focus and exposure, a charge made by Ralph Rene.

• The astronauts were trained in the use of their gear, and shots and poses were planned in advance as part of the mission. NASA selected only the best photographs for release to the public, and some of the photos were cropped to improve their composition. There are many badly exposed, badly focused and poorly composed images amongst the thousands of photos that were taken by the Apollo Astronauts. Many can be seen at the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal. Photos were taken on high-quality Hasselblad cameras with Zeiss lenses, using 70 mm medium format film.^[21]

The photos contain artifacts

There are artifacts in the photos such as the two seemingly matching 'C's on a rock and on the ground (the rock is seen in NASA photos AS16-107-17445 and 17446). They could be "prop continuity markers". Hoax proponents say that the first copies of the photos released do show these marks, and that later releases may have been doctored, and that attempts to debunk this problem focus exclusively on one example on the rock, ignoring the second on the ground and the coincidence of two, allegedly identical artifacts on the same photo.^[22]

• The "C"-shaped objects are most likely printing imperfections not in the original film from the camera, but only in some of the later generation copies of AS16-107-17446 (and no copies of 17445). One suggestion, as seen in the next link, is that when magnified the 'C' is a coiled hair present on a specific print of the photo which was later widely duplicated. (See Who Mourns For Apollo? (PDF part 2) and this link.)

Original AS16-107-17445 photograph

Original AS16-107-17446 photograph

Close up of later generation prints of 17446

Artifacts in the film

A resident of Perth, Australia, with the pseudonym Una Ronald, said she saw a soft drink bottle in the frame which was edited out of later versions, and said that many articles appeared discussing this in The West Australian newspaper at the time. Western Australia was the only place in the world that got their feed 'live' without delay.^[23]

• It is true that Australian viewers saw the footage first, as the downlink was to several radio-telescopes in New South Wales, including the famous Parkes Observatory.^[24] But the lead over Houston's transmission was only 6 seconds. Not enough time to do a convincing superimposition of a bottle being kicked by an astronaut, and not enough time to convincingly remove a bottle kicked by an actor, even with today's technology, and even if the operator was prepared in advance.

• Transmissions from the moon required video signals of very different design than that of ordinary television, and were converted to standard video by pointing a camera at a video screen, a process known as kinescope^[24]-- similar to the predominant method of recording TV in the day -- to 16mm film, not to video-tape, which was expensive and cumbersome.^[25] The process is vulnerable to added reflections between the monitor glass and the camera lens. "Ghost" mirror images of highlights appear throughout the recordings of the broadcast video and are undoubtedly a result of this process.^[26] Such artifacts were noticed at the time by the operators, though some of them may have been introduced in the recording of the broadcast, rather than during the preparation for broadcast.

Analysis shows an optical artifact fitting the description given. It is clearly caused by a reflection inside the kinescope conversion system. Its motion precisely mirrors Aldrin's in the shot (see Kick the bottle and "Una Ronald").

An MPEG video segment available directly from NASA, said to be of the exact footage in question,^[27] does indeed show artifacts which correspond to ghosting occurring -- although none obviously resemble any type of bottle. Indeed, with the quality of the recording available, spotting a stray bottle on the "set" is a hard task, even when told what to look for, where and when.

• A researcher who examined archival copies of the editions of the paper surrounding this time was unable to find any evidence of discussion described by the original source.^[23]

• "Una Ronald"'s true identity has been kept secret (however the brand-name of the soft drink bottle has been widely promoted), and her claims have only been relayed by one source.

• According to one source,^[23] the claim from "Una" distinctly mentioned that she had to "stay up late" to watch the moon landing live. This may indicate that she is an invention of someone who is not from Australia, or who has little knowledge of the Moon Landing, as those who did watch the moon landing live in Australia usually recall that it occurred in the middle of the Australian day. This event was the news-of-the-day and the talk-of-the-town, the world over, and it requires a stretch of the imagination to conceive that someone who witnessed it could misplace the timing so grossly, and yet accurately recall the presence of a bottle flashing past in the blink of an eye, well enough to discount the weight of evidence in favour of the belief that humankind did in fact reach the moon. All Australian school children, where possible, were given the opportunity to watch it on television live -- a very very rare treat indeed, in 1969 in an Australian school!^[28]

• It would be technically incorrect to say that Western Australia received the footage "before the rest of the world", since this discounts the remainder of Australia. So if that is what was claimed in the original source for the claim, then that is one more glossing-over of the specific details of the event, which does not count in their favour, and demonstrates an actual lack-of-familiarity with Australia.

• Parkes puts the time of the broadcast at 12:54pm, and WA is 2 hours behind Australian Eastern Standard Time,^[29] so any live broadcast would have been received there at around 11am local time. (Daylight saving time is not active in the Southern Hemisphere in July when the moon landing took place, so the calculation is simplified.) So assuming "Una" did indeed watch her broadcast late at night, then logically the reason her footage differed from that seen by the rest of the world must have been that it had been doctored between the time of the live broadcast when most of the world failed to observe anything unusual, and her later viewing some kind of delayed broadcast^[23] (none is known to have taken place, but the possibility is hard to rule out).

However it is not difficult to verify that video-tape technology was not widely available in 1969, and was bulky, expensive and required specialist knowledge to operate.^[25][30] Film was still the predominant storage medium, even for professional archiving of television broadcasts.^[24] Altering a video tape would require access to prized equipment, which would be unlikely to be available to the casual practical-joker, even if they had the ability to operate it so well.

A clearly altered photo was published

The 1994 hardback version of Moon Shot by Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton contains a photograph of Shepard playing golf on the Moon with another astronaut. The picture is an obvious fake, there being no one else to take the shot of the two, and the artwork was poor (such as the grapefruit sized "golf ball"), and yet it was presented as if it were a real photo.^[31]

The altered photo - the second astronaut is located in the 'fold' in the middle of the scanned photo

TV image of the actual scene

• The picture was made (for the book) from several individual shots from the Hasselblad cameras (which had already been stowed at that point), and does not appear in the 1995 UK paperback version, although at no point is its nature mentioned in the book. It was used in lieu of the only existing real images, from the TV monitor, which the editors of the book apparently felt were too grainy to present in a book's picture section.
• The Lunar Module and its shadow come from a left/right reversal of AS14-66-9276. The astronaut on the right is a left/right reversal from AS14-66-9240, the TV camera has been removed. The astronaut on the left is a left/right reversal of AS14-66-9241, again with the TV camera removed. The flag is from AS14-66-9232 or one of the similar photos. Some of the equipment came from a photo similar to AS14-67-9361. The golf club, ball, and some shadows have been added. See this webpage for the dialog and discussion of the activity that the faked photo depicts.

Shepard duffed the first ball and hit the second one fairly cleanly. Houston joked to Shepard "That looked like a slice to me, Al.", yet a slice is caused by uneven airflow on the ball. This is inconsequential with an atmosphere as thin as that of the moon.^[32][33]

• The ball moved only two or three feet. Shepard also stated that the second ball went "miles and miles" (off-camera of the TV broadcast), which was clearly a joke, like the comment about the slice. Shepard later said, "I thought, with the same club-head speed, the ball's going to go at least six times as far. There's absolutely no drag, so if you do happen to spin it, it won't slice or hook 'cause there's no atmosphere to make it turn." A slice comes from hitting the ball off the outer end of the club-head, versus hitting it square in the middle of the club-head, versus hooking it, which is hitting it off the inner end of the club-head. Shepard did, in effect, "slice" the ball at first, and as he notes, being in the virtually non-existent lunar atmosphere, the ball did not curve laterally as an earthbound slice would.

• See ALSJ, click on "Apollo 14" on the left, under "Second EVA", click on "A nice day for a game of golf", and scroll down to "135:08:17", which has a transcript of the actual dialog. Just above "135:08:17" is a video clip of the golfing sequence. Below "135:09:26" is a discussion of the mock-up photo in "Moon Shot".

Apparent air resistance

With no air resistance, the trajectory of a projectile is a parabola. Apparent deviation of the dust particles from the ideal parabolic trajectory on the footage of the Appolo 16 lunar rover was attributed to the influence of air resistance, implying that the footage is fake. The argument would be plausible were the dust particles ejected with a constant velocity by a source moving with a constant speed. However, the wheels were ejecting the particles with a greatly varying speed, when the rover was moving over deep dust pockets.

1-3. The dust cloud on these Apollo 16 lunar rover photos is not of a parabolic shape. 4. Although each particle on the plot follows a parabolic trajectory, the overall shape of the dust cloud deviates strongly from the parabolic shape. Note that the simulation does not attempt to mimic the exact shape of the dust cloud, it merely shows that a complex, unexpected pattern may emerge from simple laws.

See also

• Apollo Moon Landing hoax theories
• Independent evidence for Apollo Moon landings

References