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We all know the moon landing was a hoax. ;-)

(just a bit of morning humour)

to say that dust "billows" on the moon. Without air to form currents and eddies, anything tossed up just follows a ballistic path until it hits the ground again.

I'll mitigate the annoying inanity of my nit-picking by adding that I learned this from BadAstronomy, where the fact was used to counter "evidence" used by moon-hoax loonies.

aha, I think They [que Twilight zone theme] found errors in all missions. However bad astronomy will sort you out when it comes to defuse the conspiracy minded! ;-)

As a "skeptic" I found both Jon's comments on Crossfire and this article to be enjoyable -- in the sense that here's someone saying what we've known to be true for years.

If any of you feel this way, you might enjoy some fine skeptical sites such as:

The James Randi Educational Foundation
http://www.randi.org/

Committe for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
http://www.csicop.org/

Bad Astronomy
http://www.badastronomy.com/

But be sure to check out Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy site for fact-checks.

Hopefully you are being sarcastic. Every lunar landing conspiracy arguement I've seen has been logicaly debunked.
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.html

-1,Offtopic

I used to work in a bookstore. I'd have conversations with customers over in the science section quite a bit. One time, I was talking with this guy about Tesla. After about 10 minutes he said, "You seem like a reasonably intelligent man, let me ask, do you think we landed on the moon?"

Ugh.

I've read quite a bit about the Apollo missions, I've read all the stuff on www., even Philip's book Bad Astronomy. I had an answer for everything he questioned. It was fun. =]

He then started talking about the military shooting down commercial 747s. I left.

As with all science, a few people have come up with crazy theories that differ from this. For instance, James McCanney. A debunking of his stuff can be found here.

And Arthur C. Clarke believes Martian life exists to this day. It's easy to see that the so-called spiders look life-like, and I'd like very much for that to turn out to be the case. Mind you, the human brain is pretty good forming patterns out of just about anything.

Ask Phil Plait.

You should've read Bad Astronomy.

It's waving because the astronaut is wiggling the pole back and forth, trying to get it to enter the ground.

There is nothing even remotely sexual about the previous sentence.

I think he was trying to be funny, if not, I recommend reading something like this.

Goddamnit, didn't I tell you to read badastronomy.com? http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.html# stars/ is the link to the stars question.

"So why aren't they in the Apollo pictures? Pretend for a moment you are an astronaut on the surface of the Moon. You want to take a picture of your fellow space traveler. The Sun is low off the horizon, since all the lunar landings were done at local morning. How do you set your camera? The lunar landscape is brightly lit by the Sun, of course, and your friend is wearing a white spacesuit also brilliantly lit by the Sun. To take a picture of a bright object with a bright background, you need to set the exposure time to be fast, and close down the aperture setting too; that's like the pupil in your eye constricting to let less light in when you walk outside on a sunny day.

So the picture you take is set for bright objects. Stars are faint objects! In the fast exposure, they simply do not have time to register on the film. It has nothing to do with the sky being black or the lack of air, it's just a matter of exposure time. If you were to go outside here on Earth on the darkest night imaginable and take a picture with the exact same camera settings the astronauts used, you won't see any stars! "

Yeesh.
-aiabx

Yes.

Please go to http://www.badastronomy.com/ before you waste our time and bandwidth with your moon-hoax crap.
-aiabx

And the obligatory Bad Astronomy link. Phil Plait did a wonderful job of debunking the myth. And a lot of other myths too, click around, it's a great site to spend some time on.

This is a very good point, and what with all the Fox news bollocks and such, many, many young people (and many my age too) really get into doubt if it did happen at all - which makes me mad and want to slap them like Buzz Aldrin did.

Bad Astronomy

Nick

Or better yet, try Phil Plait's review... on his Bad Astronomy website

Exactly. And aren't we the ones who always say "Information wants to be free"?

And here's a lesson in the power of grassroots/independent organizing if I ever saw one. It's not like Hollywood doesn't churn out overtly political, completely false moves (The Core, insert-you-favorite-bad-facts movie).

Moore is doing what blogger do, but with in a format that appeals to the average tech-ignorant American.

If you're looking for something spesific, it's easy to find it.. our mind is good at recognisong patterns, even when they arn't there. Off course, this is what leads people to see cities om Mars, Lenin in their shower curtain and, in this cause, traces of Atlantis. It's called pareidolia, and it's more common than you might think.

PS: I urge everyone to visit the link and explore the site - it's a good read and quite interesting as well as funny.

Ford loved working on films 1 and 2--he invented "parsecs" for that famous line. It was film 3 you can tell he wanted no part of...

Shh! If Lucas finds out that Han Solo uttered an incorrect measure of time and/or distance, he'll change it. To something like "She can make the Kessel run in 12 parsecs [dubbed, flat voice] per Galactic standard cycle.

Mod as funny, but remember: worse things have happened!

This is pretty laughable. Ad homoneim it may be, but Richard Hoagland is pretty much the worst offender in pseudoscience.

Angstrom winner Richard Hoagland

To the unaware, there is a medal given out by Uppsala University in Sweden under the auspices of the Royal Swedish Academy called the Angstrom Medal. Pretty impressive stuff. Now there's this private group, the AFAB, who decided to give out an Angstrom Medal to Hoagland. Here is a nice quote from the department of Physics at Uppsala:

The Angstrom foundation is a private foundation without connections to Uppsala or any other university. The department of Physics in Uppsala, where two professors Angstrom have been active, has no links with the activities of Richard Hoagland. The department considers the Hoagland project as speculative and unscientific and rejects it entirely.

BTW interplanetary climate specialist (what, are you talking solar wind here? What is this interplanetary climate you are speaking of?), you might think you know a lot about the subject, but your analysis of the Mars climate shows you are very ignorant (hint: you need to consider extinction values and optical depth, to name just two items). Please provide even a back-of-the-envelope calculation to show that Mars should be hotter than Mercury. While we wait, you can also tell us all about "the face," the "geometry of Cydonia," and you might as well weigh in with your scientific expertise and explain why the Martian atmosphere is as blue as a Texas sky. These are, after all, all topics widely promoted and lectured upon by the "great" Hoagland.

For the rest of you, if you want to see what a huge pile of horseshit people like this peddle, start with pages like this.

Yeah, yeah, I know, "fight the system," "the man is keeping you down," etc., etc. I apologize for my ramblings, but I am just part of the scientific intelligentsia who will not rest until we bury the "truth" and protect our positions, and we can't help but attack the few honest men like you.

(b) The Bounce discoveries do not necessarily support the conclusion that life orginated on Mars and came to Earth. All they do is further support the notion that some of the meterorites striking Earth have a Martian origin. Whether or not those meteorites carried biological payloads is a whole different question.

Plait HAS offered to debate RCH, it's just the RCH refuses to agree on a list of topics, so as to avoid Plait getting dragged into a Tinfoil Hat 'Fest of RCH screaming, "Prove that I'm NOT right!"

From Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy: Review of Deep Impact:

This was the Biggest Baddest Astronomy in the movie. Blowing up a comet does no good at all, and might even make matters worse. Just because the pieces are smaller doesn't mean you have changed anything. If every piece still impacts the Earth (by that I mean actually is stopped by the Earth or its atmosphere) you are still dumping all the kinetic energy of The Comet into the Earth's atmosphere! That's a HUGE amount of energy, dumped in practically all at once. It would still create a massive explosion, dwarfing all of our nuclear bombs combined. Even if you could somehow soften the blow, all that heat would wreak havoc with our weather. Some people actually think it might be better to simply let a big one hit rather than blow it up, because the Earth itself can absorb the energy of impact better than the atmosphere can. This is still argued, though. I'd prefer not to try any experiments!

If you look around, you can find a couple of good sites around that carry the torch.

another page on the bad astronomy links to the trueth about Moon. By the way, "pravda" on russian means "trueth".

I'm 99 44/100% sure you're kidding...

but just in case...!

Based on surveys, it has been estimated that between 6 and 20 percent of Americans do not believe a man actually walked on the moon. Are 6-20 percent of Americans fools, or are they a little brighter than the rest?

They're fools.

Someone has spent to many hours finding shapes in the clouds!

There's a cool name for that - 'pareidolia'. Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy fame has got a page on it, or more precisely on how he found Lenin on his shower curtain.

Some people seem to be more susceptible than others. I seem to be immune - in all these pictures of rocks from Mars, I've yet to see a single alien building or artefact. I'm very disappointed. :-)

Does the side blaster work? If it does - I want one - and a Wookie sidekick and a flygirl Lela and a...

It's true that the tides can't dissipate momentum, as momentum can't disappear... but the Earth can transfer momentum to the moon through gravitational forces. When the moon and Earth are tidal locked (in billions, not millions of years) the moon will be farther away from the Earth, and the overall angular momentum will be the same.

As far as how this happens, this page has a pretty good explanation.

http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.html

Damn that Hubble data embargo!

Holger Isenberg, the guy behind mars-news.de, is one of many kooks out there who are too ugly and interpersonally incompetent to ever hope to get laid in this life time. He must therefore resort to enclosing himself into his imaginary universe of in-bred conspiracy theories. enjoy.

NASA has always made raw data available to the public, which is what you can leverage thru the Maestro the software. The red tint observed in composite pictures made available to the public are, in fact, a fairly accurate representation of the truth. Pictures MUST be composited to be available in a JPEG format Joe Six Pack can look at in his browser, hence some level of alteration is necessary. There is no lie. There is no conspiracy. Even your average Joe Six Pack can grok the fact that some basic alterations are necessary to represent flat images. Otherwise Joe Six Pack can always download Maestro.

I don't think this has been addressed on it yet, but a good reference for these sorts of claims is Bad Astronomy.

Many lives were sacrificed to get the United States to the moon. Your claim is not justified and very offensive. The Apollo program was/is an engineering marvel that should be embraced by all mankind. Here are some rebuttals to your feeble claim of a moon hoax.

The dark side of the moon gets plenty of sunlight when the moon is between Earth and Sol.

Look here for more information about why we always see the same part of the moon

That nuclear material could have an unmeasureable detrimental effect on any life there is there, so NASA needs to be damn certain that this baby will not contaminate the surface even if the worst case scenario was to occur.

The possibility of contamination is precisely why the Galileo satellite was purposefully crashed into Jupiter. It was to prevent earth-based microbes (not nuclear material) from contaminating Europa, in the chance that it would eventually crash there after loosing power. Preventing biological contamination of enviroments in which life may have independently originated is of prime importance.

Concerns of biological contamination could be addressed in future missions via proper sterilization of the spacecraft. This was not done with Galileo because there was no reason to do so at the time. It may have been sterile, but had not been checked as such.

Though nuclear contamination was not the issue, Galileo did have nuclear material onboard for power (but not a fission reactor). This led to some folks speculate that NASA was trying to detonate Jupiter, which is nicely debunked here.

Europa's oceans are thought to be at least 2 times as voluminous as all of Earth's oceans combined

One of the main points of the mission is to confirm the existence of these oceans. The oceans are only inferred: we believe that there is a large liquid water ocean because of Europa's magnetic moment. The salt-water is conductive, and as Jupiter's magnetic fied varies, it induces a field in Europa. As Europa moves through various parts of Jupiter's field, the orientation varies. We detect this field and its variations, and deduce a large ocean. More information is here.

That link should be posted along with every article relating to space, IMHO. Not that the people that need to read it will...

They all got debunked.

The sun moves (about) 180degrees/12hours = 15degrees/hour or about 3 degrees in 12 minutes.

If taken when the angle of the shadows is relatively low (like high noon), I doubt it would be noticeable.
However, it looks like it was taken near sunset or sunrise, in which case the change in length of the shadows would be much more dramatic.

The math is explained here but you'd need to know the height of the canyons plus the angle of the sun or the length of the shadows to get an exact result.

Here's a thread discussing the ep on bad astronomy.com

Because gravity is still in action on the ink when the pen is horizontal, at a guess. Writing with the pen held horizontally isn't the same as writing in microgravity - in microgravity the stickiness of the ink is more than capable of pulling more ink towards the ball as it writes, whereas with the pen held horizontally in normal G it still has to pull ink "uphill" against gravity towards the top of the ball.

It'a another example of how nearly impossible it is to extrapolate what happens in space or on the Moon from our experiences on Earth - for more examples, check out Bad Astronomy on the Apollo "Hoax"

The lunar dust has a peculiar property: it tends to reflect light back in the direction from where it came. So if you were to stand on the Moon and shine a flashlight at the surface, you would see a very bright spot where the light hits the ground, but, oddly, someone standing a bit to the side would hardly see it at all. The light is preferentially reflected back toward the flashlight (and therefore you), and not the person on the side.

I, for one, WELCOME all of the doubters of the American Space program! It'll make it much easier to send them all packing on the 'B Ark' currently on the launchpad at Cape Canaveral!

The Nemesis Theory sounds awfully similar to a lot of the Planet X stuff that Phil Plait has already debunked. Suggest you read that and have a laugh whilst you're at it.

p

You can take this tenth planet and stick it where the sun don't shine.