Excellent post mcrom901! Thanks for highlighting those color comments. The DSE/DSEA transcripts from the Apollo Program offer us some very
interesting, candid reports straight from the astronauts themselves that relate to naked eye color observations, clearly demonstrating that there is
indeed visible color information up there on the lunar surface that is not detectable when viewed through Earth's atmospheric veil down here on Terra
Firma, some 400,000 kilometers away.
Another good source I have found for these types of color-related comments from the astronauts are the post-mission debrief documents from each Apollo
mission. After the Apollo 10 mission for example, the crew was debriefed about the naked-eye color of the Moon by a photographic analysis team led by
Dr. Farouk El-Baz, the lunar guru from BellComm who was one of the most powerful and knowledgable men attached to the Apollo Lunar Program.
While working for BellComm during the Apollo era, Farouk El-Baz played an instrumental role in the construction and implementation of the Apollo
scientific/selenographic cover-story that the public was fed, and behind the scenes he was (and is) deeply involved in the true classified aspects of
the lunar sciences as well. During this debriefing of the Apollo 10 crew in June of 1969, El-Baz and his team inquired about (among other things) the
astronaut naked eye color observations of the Moon. The debriefers used color photographs that the astronauts had just taken a couple weeks earlier
during the Apollo 10 flight, showing them to Stafford, Young and Cernan to let them conduct their own memory-versus-imagery comparative analysis to
help determine the accuracy of the color data represented in the photographs.
Here is how Farouk El-Baz consolidated the naked-eye color observations from the Apollo 10 crew, as published in a BellComm document from June 12th,
1969 titled "APOLLO 10 PHOTO DEBRIEFING - CASE #340".
I dunno if that frame capture above is going to appear properly or not, so here is the direct photobucket link to the cropped quote.
i276.photobucket.com...
Here is the link to the full BellComm "Apollo 10 Photo Debrief - Case #340" document (PDF format)
ntrs.nasa.gov...
Here are the links to the low-res NASA/LPI archive versions of the two frames of color film that are directly referenced in the BellComm document -
frames AS10-34-5149 and AS10-34-5079.
www.lpi.usra.edu...
www.lpi.usra.edu...
The whole "true color of the Moon" issue is definitely a bizarre one that the general public seem to have been hoodwinked by ever since...well, ever
since troglodytic cavemen first gazed skyward to marvel and wonder about that closest celestial neighbor in the Heavens. There is no question that
there is indeed color data being reflected off the Moon that is, for a variety of reasons, simply not discernible from way down here on Earth , and
these are facts that have been in large part simply ignored by the public. We have been conditioned to think that the terrestrial naked-eye view of
the lunar disc must be giving us a color-accurate representation, and that simply is not the truth at all. We are only seeing a very small part of the
very big picture.
Remember that (according to the official public record at least) only 24 sets of human eyeballs have ever ventured beyond the upper exospheric layer
of our planet’s atmosphere, and those eyeballs belonged to the 24 astronauts who made the voyage from the Earth to the Moon during the nine Apollo
lunar missions. Their subjective observations are therefore very important evidence that the Moon does indeed have color.
Cheers,
Luna
Mod edit: corrected image tags.
[edit on 22/11/2009 by ArMaP]
are they in false
colours? 
