Apollo 16 Flag is Still Casting Shadows

reply to post by Rob48


I love spot the difference! I can see a few differences in both pics (at least 3 besides the "assumed" module), possible meteor strikes, i dunno. Least it gets people thinking, and that is all i intend to do. This will allow someone with the correct resources to want to prove once and for all. Grainy pics with white dots will never convince me, therefore a part of of the population is also thinking the same thing, no fail :-)

reply to post by Rob48


According to an ESO Press Release, scientists working at The Very Large Telescope (VLT) array in Chile “were able to see details on the scale of one milli-arcsecond, corresponding to being able to distinguish, from the Earth, the headlights of a car on the Moon”. 1 milli-arcsecond is 0.001arc-seconds. This means the Very Large Telescope is perfect to resolve man made equipment left behind on the lunar surface. Indeed, in a 2002 Daily Telegraph article, Dr. Richard West stated that he would use the VLT to try and resolve the Apollo artefacts, but so far no luck.

This is from Jarrah White's website. I can't claim that this is true but this is where I got the information about the telescope. Hey, I was at least right about it being from South America.

Yes, I realize you despise JW but I'm just using this quip because of the telescope clarification.

ipfreely32
reply to post by Rob48

 

I love spot the difference! I can see a few differences in both pics (at least 3 besides the "assumed" module), possible meteor strikes, i dunno. Least it gets people thinking, and that is all i intend to do. This will allow someone with the correct resources to want to prove once and for all. Grainy pics with white dots will never convince me, therefore a part of of the population is also thinking the same thing, no fail :-)

So the LRO photographs are the only evidence that the Apollo program landed on the Moon? Really? Is that really what you think? Do you really think a significant fraction of the population believes the same thing you do?

reply to post by cestrup

Thanks, I had forgotten about the VLT. But, at least according to the operators, it doesn't have enough resolution to see the landers, so I'd love to know where Jarrah got that from. The best resolution of the moon on the link in this quote is 0.07 arcsec, 70 times lower than he claimed.

Q: Could the VLT take a picture of the Moon-landing sites?
A: Yes, but the images would not be detailed enough to show the equipment left behind by the astronauts. Using its adaptive optics system, the VLT has already taken one of the sharpest ever images of the lunar surface as seen from Earth: www.eso.org... However, the smallest details visible in this image are still about one hundred metres on the surface of the Moon, while the parts of the lunar modules which are left on the Moon are less than 10 metres in size. A telescope 200 metres in diameter would be needed to show them. Although the VLT, when used as an interferometer (VLTI), reaches the same equivalent resolution, it cannot be used to observe the Moon. You may be wondering whether the Hubble Space Telescope would have better luck. In fact, while a space telescope is not affected by the atmosphere of the Earth, it is not substantially closer to the Moon. Also, the Hubble is smaller than the VLT, so it isn’t able to obtain images that show the surface of the Moon with higher resolution. The sharpest images of the lunar landers have been taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

www.eso.org...

The question is..

cestrup
reply to post by Rob48

 

According to an ESO Press Release, scientists working at The Very Large Telescope (VLT) array in Chile “were able to see details on the scale of one milli-arcsecond, corresponding to being able to distinguish, from the Earth, the headlights of a car on the Moon”. 1 milli-arcsecond is 0.001arc-seconds. This means the Very Large Telescope is perfect to resolve man made equipment left behind on the lunar surface. Indeed, in a 2002 Daily Telegraph article, Dr. Richard West stated that he would use the VLT to try and resolve the Apollo artefacts, but so far no luck.

This is from Jarrah White's website. I can't claim that this is true but this is where I got the information about the telescope. Hey, I was at least right about it being from South America.

Yes, I realize you despise JW but I'm just using this quip because of the telescope clarification.

If you are quoting Jarrah White, then I hope you are aware of his propensity to distort the truth. The VLT is limited not merely in resolution, but in atmospheric transparency. There are ways of correcting for atmospheric turbulence mechanically, and images can be stacked to bring out details. All of these processes would result in cries of "manipulation" from the peanut gallery. In any event, the VLT has other priorities now.

ipfreely32
reply to post by Rob48

 

I love spot the difference! I can see a few differences in both pics (at least 3 besides the "assumed" module), possible meteor strikes, i dunno. Least it gets people thinking, and that is all i intend to do. This will allow someone with the correct resources to want to prove once and for all. Grainy pics with white dots will never convince me, therefore a part of of the population is also thinking the same thing, no fail :-)

This one is better. LRO on the left, Lunar Orbiter 3 on the right.



You can also match up features in the craters to Apollo images if you're prepared to put the effort in, which I am. The image below is of Bench crater, which Alan Bean and Pete Conrad passed on the way to Surveyor.



The top image is Apollo. Bottom left is the LRO, bottom right is the best available image at the time of Apollo from Lunar Orbiter 3. The pretty arrows are mine, because some people need help seeing what's right in front of them.

reply to post by DJW001


OK I think I see where JW might have got his figures from. As usual, he is cherry-picking numbers that aren't actually relevant. From the same FAQ page...

Q: How does the VLT Interferometer (VLTI) work?
A: The power of the VLT Interferometer does not come from adding the light beams from the individual telescopes to gather more light. Instead, the light waves are made to interfere with each other to produce patterns of light and dark fringes, a little like the way ripples on water can combine to produce either bigger waves or cancel to produce calm water. This technique is called interferometry. The fringes give us information about the structure of the observed object, but they are not an image of it. If an image is needed, it must be reconstructed by mathematically combining the information from many sets of fringes. However, many important scientific questions can be answered without making an image of an object. For the interferometry to work, the light waves must be combined very precisely using a complex system of mirrors in underground tunnels. The paths along which the light travels must be kept accurate to a fraction of the wavelength of the light, to control the phase of the waves. The accuracy required in positioning the mirrors is less than 1/1000 mm over a hundred metres. Thanks to this technological feat, the VLTI can reconstruct images with an angular resolution of 2 milliarcseconds, and allow astronomers to see details up to 16 times finer than with the individual VLT Unit Telescopes.

The only way he could have got a figure even close to 1 milliarcsecond is by confusing the interferometer's theoretical resolution with the visible image resolution. Whether he did that because he doesn't understand optics or because he was being deliberately deceptive, I'll leave as an open question...


Edit... and sure enough I have found the original press release that Jarrah quoted:

www.eso.org...

To provide some context here is the original quote:

"This result could only be achieved because of the great details we could observe with the AMBER instrument combining three 8.2-m Unit Telescopes of ESO's VLT," said Philippe Stee, leader of the team that performed the study [1]".

With AMBER on the VLTI [2], the astronomers were able to see details on the scale of one milli-arcsecond, corresponding to being able to distinguish, from the Earth, the headlights of a car on the Moon.

As I thought, he was talking about the interferometer, not visible images.

reply to post by Rob48


To Jarrah's defense, the scientist operating the VLT was trying to use it to see the Apollo sites as well. So he may have thought it was capable too.

"Operated by European astronomers in the Chilean Andes, the VLT consists of four mirrors 27ft across linked by optical fibres. It can see a single human hair at a distance of 10 miles.

Trained on the Moon, such astonishing resolution should enable it to see the base of one or more of the six lunar modules which Nasa insists landed on the Moon between 1969 and 1972. Any images of the modules would be the first not to have been taken from space by Nasa.

Dr Richard West, an astronomer at the VLT, confirmed that his team was aiming to achieve "a high-resolution image of one of the Apollo landing sites".

The first attempt to spot the spacecraft will be made using only one of the VLT's four telescope mirrors, which are fitted with special "adaptive optics" to cancel the distorting effect of the Earth's atmosphere. A trial run of the equipment this summer produced the sharpest image of the Moon taken from the Earth, showing details 400ft across from a distance of 238,000 miles.

The VLT team hopes to improve on this, with the aim of detecting clear evidence for the presence of the landers. The base of the lunar modules measured about 10ft across, but would cast a much longer shadow under ideal conditions.

Dr West said that the challenge pushed the optical abilities of one VLT mirror to its limits: if this attempt failed, the team planned to use the power of all four mirrors. "They would most probably be sufficiently sharp to show something at the sites," he said.

Dr West insisted, however, that the decision to examine the landing sites was not driven by the conspiracy theory. "We do not question the reality of the landings," he said. "It is more for instrument-testing purposes."

Supporters of the conspiracy theory welcomed the news that astronomers are to photograph the landing sites. Marcus Allen, UK publisher of Nexus magazine and a long-time advocate of the theory, said: "I would be the first to accept what they find as powerful evidence that something was placed on the Moon by man."

He added, however, that photographs of the lander would not prove that America put men on the Moon. "Getting to the Moon really isn't much of a problem - the Russians did that in 1959," said Mr Allen. "The big problem is getting people there."

According to Mr Allen, Nasa was forced to send robots to the Moon and faked the manned missions because radiation levels in space were lethal to humans. "We know that no lead shielding was carried on Apollo, so how were 27 astronauts able to survive a journey of several days to and from the Moon?"

Dr Duncan Steel, a space scientist at Salford University, said that the supposed radiation hazard is a myth spread by conspiracy theorists.

Dr Robert Massey, an astronomer at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, said that the conspiracy theorists are unlikely to be deterred by photographic evidence. "Even if the VLT does see something, I suspect it won't silence them. In science we can never totally prove anything - but we can prove things beyond reasonable doubt."

reply to post by cestrup

There's a bit of a contradiction somewhere along the line because this quote:

Dr West said that the challenge pushed the optical abilities of one VLT mirror to its limits: if this attempt failed, the team planned to use the power of all four mirrors. "They would most probably be sufficiently sharp to show something at the sites," he said.

suggests that they were considering using the interferometer (which combines images from four mirrors), but this quote from the VLT FAQ appears to rule that out:

Although the VLT, when used as an interferometer (VLTI), reaches the same equivalent resolution, it cannot be used to observe the Moon.

So something has got lost in translation it would appear. I don't know enough about this topic to say whether the interferometer could image the moon or not.

Edit: and I see Phage has provided a response from someone who does know... the problem being shoddy reporting, it would appear. As a journalist I know that the standard of writing on scientific topics is pretty appalling, in general.

reply to post by Rob48


An email response from a colleague of Richard West:

I have worked with Richard for some times (he was my thesis supervisor almost 20yrs ago) - the least I can say is that he was a very very careful gentleman, and that he very seldom issue anything like a bold statement. I can of course not claim he did not actually say that, but I have a suspicion that the journalists might have ... extrapolated a little what he said. This particular journalist does not strike me as very accurate (cf the notes in the above texts about the factual errors).

In any case, I am really sorry, but the observations would not work, if they were ever attempted. It is one of the most frustrating issue with interferometry: it works well only for small things on a dark background. Anything extended adds noise, but no details can be seen on it.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

reply to post by Rob48


So quick to believe the snippet that's from a supposed e-mail sourced by an ATS member? I don't know which side is telling the truth but from the article I posed, it would appear that West was trying to see the landing sites, equipment etc. Phage's article may in fact be telling the truth and I may, in fact, be a trained chimpanzee-hybrid typing this from the basements of Dulce. We must see both sides because the internet can be a tricky, misleading place!

reply to post by cestrup

If you read entire sequence of communications, and if you know what interferometery is, you will see that it would make no sense to say that Apollo landing sites could have been imaged. It makes sense that the journalist screwed up. Very common, journalists often screw up when it comes to science.

reply to post by Phage


I'm not getting that at all from the article or West or Massey's quotes. I think they genuinely believed they could observe "something". They both seemed adament about proving the conspiracy theorists wrong with this information. Even the "email" you posted stated he wasn't entirely sure but he thought it could be the journalist sensationalizing. Maybe it was this case but I'm going to need more proof of this falsity than what's being presented. Currently, I think with the combined quotes it stacks in the favor of these men believing the VLT could produce something back in 2002. Maybe they were way off and embarrassed. I don't know

reply to post by Phage

Thanks for the link.

That thread made for pretty funny reading. Everyone on this thread moaning about how poor the LRO images are, when that thread kicked off with complaints that there weren't any better images of the "cigar shaped craft" photographed by Apollo 15.

You know the one:




Well, I just put those co-ordinates into the LRO map viewer and... the LRO doesn't look too shoddy, does it?



I've rotated it to approximately the same orientation as the A15 image. And that's not even close to maximum resolution. Here's a zoom on that crater boxed in red in the image above:



Yeah they will never release high-res images of this mysterious cigar shaped valley

reply to post by cestrup

More evidence the journalist made stuff up (or, at best, did not understand what he was being told).

The first attempt to spot the spacecraft will be made using only one of the VLT's four telescope mirrors, which are fitted with special "adaptive optics" to cancel the distorting effect of the Earth's atmosphere.

This makes no sense, there is no possibility whatsoever that an 8.2 meter telescope could image Apollo landers. It would require a telescope with a 100 meter mirror. blogs.discovermagazine.com...

BTW, here is an infrared image of the Moon from the VLT. Taken in April of 2002, before the article was published, it has a resolution of 130 meters.
www.eso.org...

reply to post by Rob48


No, JW got that from the horse's mouth. This is from a press release:

"the astronomers were able to see details on the scale of one milli-arcsecond, corresponding to being able to distinguish, from the Earth, the headlights of a car on the Moon."

amber.obs.ujf-grenoble.fr...

reply to post by cestrup

The problem is that VLTI works only with "coherent sources" - in short, the light must come from very sharp objects (like a very distant star), and does not work with extended sources (like a patch of lunar soil). So, when we now refer to the Moon as an example for VLTI, we say "we would be able to distinguish the 2 headlights on a lunar rover" (as these are 2 sharp sources).

www.abovetopsecret.com...

reply to post by cestrup

No, JW got that from the horse's mouth. This is from a press release:

"the astronomers were able to see details on the scale of one milli-arcsecond, corresponding to being able to distinguish, from the Earth, the headlights of a car on the Moon."

I know. I included a link to that press release in my post above — in fact the very post that you were replying to! — and explained that it confirms my belief that Jarrah was conflating the maximum resolution of the interferometer with the maximum resolution of ordinary images.

cestrup
reply to post by Rob48

 

No, JW got that from the horse's mouth. This is from a press release:

"the astronomers were able to see details on the scale of one milli-arcsecond, corresponding to being able to distinguish, from the Earth, the headlights of a car on the Moon."

amber.obs.ujf-grenoble.fr...

edit on 15-4-2014 by cestrup because: (no reason given)

And as pointed out this is not an optical telescope that they are talking about, and that result is not talking about actually seeing something on the moon, it is discussing something 300 light years away and using a simple analogy.