"Once fully operational, the VLTI will provide both a high sensitivity as well as milli-arcsec angular resolution provided by baselines of up to 200m length."

While the American flag was being put up on the moon it appears to wave. Skeptics argue that this was caused by a breeze on the set where the hoax was filmed because a flag cannot wave in a vacuum. This is wrong thinking, however. The flag waves because the astronauts were wiggling the flagpole back and forth trying to get it to stick in the lunar soil. Given that kind of motion, any cloth would wave whether it is in a vacuum or not.

Later on, still pictures show the flag apparently waving even after the astronauts have moved away from it. A glance at the moving video reveals that the flag is not waving. It simply had a ripple in it from not being fully extended across its length as it hung from its top supporting pole much like a gathered curtain. This was done accidentally on Apollo 11, but the astronauts loved this effect so much that they did it on every subsequent moonlanding.

Another argument often used to disprove the authenticity of the Apollo photographs involves the direction of the shadows. According to skeptics, the shadows in the NASA pictures appear to diverge. If the sun is the single bright light in the pictures, then the shadows should be parallel. This, according to NASA's critics, shows that the single light source was much closer to the astronauts than the sun, or there were multiple lights involved.

Clearly there were no multiple lights involved as there are no multiple shadows in the pictures. Whether the shadows appear to diverge, instead of running parallel is dependent on the camera lens used in taking the photographs. A slightly wide-angle camera, as was used on the moonwalk, can make parallel lines appear to diverge. Even so, some photographs (like the one to the right of Alan Shepard planting the flag) do not show any divergence at all, but the parallel shadows converge on the photo's vanishing point, just like they should.

The van Allen belts are a region in space where Earth's magnetic field has trapped particles from the solar wind. Skeptics of the moon landing argue that an astronaut would get a lethal dose of radiation if he were to pass through the belts on the way to the moon.

While continued exposure to the concentration of radiation found in the belts might well be fatal, the space capsule the astronauts were traveling in was going very fast and passed through the belts in a few hours. The metal hull of the capsule also gave the astronauts some protection from the radiation as well. While there was a certain risk in passing through the belts, as there is in every venture into space, the astronauts exposure from the van Allen belts was minimal: about 2 rem which is the equivalent of a 100 chest x-rays.

There are any number of points skeptics of the moon landing can bring up that don't "look right" to them, but all have simple scientific explanations when examined closely. Let's try doing the opposite: Look at some things seen on the video or in the pictures that would indicate that these things really happened on the moon.

Phil Plait of the Bad Astronomy site points outs that video footage taken of some of the moon rovers shows dust being thrown up by the wheels as it rolls across the lunar surface. The dust rises and falls in nearly a perfect parabolic arc. This can only happen in a vacuum. Dust thrown up in earth's atmosphere would float and swirl around as it was carried by eddies in the air. Wherever the rover was at the time the video was taken, it was certainly in a location that had no air. Skeptics might argue that NASA took the trouble to build a sealed set and pump the air out, but this would be a tremendously difficult undertaking. It would also contradict evidence of the "waving" flag, as described above.

Astronaut Dave Scott also did a quick physics lesson in front of the video camera during Apollo 15 that showed he was on the moon. He dropped a hammer and a feather and watched them fall to the ground. On Earth the feather's high wind resistance and low weight would have caused it to slowly drift slowly down. On the moon, however, the feather fell just as quickly as the hammer. Both dropped to the ground at exactly the same rate one would expect to see if the objects were being pulled to the ground by the moon's one-sixth Earth gravity.