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Walk on the Moon in IMAX 3D
HaveNoMouth writes "NASA, Lockheed Martin, and Tom Hanks are making an IMAX 3D movie about the Apollo moon landings to give viewers something like the actual experience of being on the moon. Complete with actors playing astronauts, mockups of the Lunar Excursion Module, and fake moon surface, this looks to be a real kick. The website for the movie itself is all shockwave, but it contains some nice behind-the-scenes photos of the production. Here's a QuickTime trailer. All you lunar hoax conspiracy theorists out there can just consider this the remake, with 2005-class special effects."
"All you lunar hoax conspiracy theorists out there can just consider this the remake, with 2005-class special effects."
I love conspiracy knotheads. They always ignore evidence that is readily available to them that would disprove their theory immediately.
On several Apollo missions, astronauts planted mirrors facing Earth. The mirror were useful for measuring the distance of the moon from the Earth and the change in readings was used to confirm the theory of plate tectonics. We now use GPS surveys with permanently mounted stations.
Funny how facts available to everyone can be ignored by people with an axe to grind.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Seems like they're not using any wire work to simulate walking on the moon. Space Cowboys is more real than this. ;)
It's going to screw up the facts in people's minds.
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This is just like the experiments on observer accuracy, where you first demonstrate an incident on film, and then show still images not actually from the film, with some details changed, and then ask the observers questions about the original film version of events.
So far I am not at all impressed with their production values or fact checking anyway... if you go to the web site, click on "Education", click the button in the top right corner, and go to the first "factoid", you will find this beauty:
"The Astronaut's Spacesuits: The astronaut's spacesuits were designed to withstand the moon's average daylight temperature of 300 degrees Fahrenheit (100 degrees Centigrade)."
(direct link here: http://www.imax.com/magnificentdesolation/pops/im
If they can't even do a temperature conversion, they are unlikely to produce anything more than inaccurate eye candy for "the masses".
-- Terry
I've been wanting to check out some of this new 3D stuff IMAX is doing, but I'm wondering if I'll be able to get the full experience.
Whenever I tried to read 3D books as a kid, I could see either red or blue with those glasses, but it would never mix and create what was supposed to be there since my eyes don't focus on the same point. It's not crazy-like. I drive w/o glasses just fine. However, it affects my ability to do anything 3D, including those pictures you're supposed to "look through" to see the real image.
Anyway, does anybody knows how the audience will get the 3D experience? I'm sure you have to wear some sort of special pair of glasses, but if it depends on each lens requiring the other at the same point to do the special stuff, I'm not going to be able to see it.
-Shippy
haven't you ever noticed that the marketing/sales department never actually reflect what the technical people are doing and what they can deliver.
Don't judge a product by it's marketing hype - it's normally all horseshit anyways.
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us. - Douglas Coupland
When you compare the two events, the long stretch of time between them - and the amazing advancements in everything else outside of actual space travel - it's not awe-inspiring. It's a piddly achievement in the scheme of things.
The only way we got to the moon in the first place was because Kennedy had the gonads to set an impossible goal WITH A DEFINITE TIME FRAME of one decade and rally the entire country behind it.
Do you seriously think if he had remained alive, he'd have said "wow, great job guys! Now our next goal is to land a little box on wheels on mars... and we have FOUR decades to do it". Hell no.
See, that's the difference. Some people think small and are satisfied with small steps. Others see where we should be. Where we could have been. And where we could go - if only we'd stop being so shocked at minor achievements.
And hell, didn't Bush say something about committment us to putting a person on Mars by 2020? And then what have we heard of it? Nothing? The "goal" doesn't have the drive behind it that the moon mission did almost 40 years ago. When 2020 comes and goes, nobody will even remember that we had a goal of getting to mars. In fact, I bet 75% of people right now don't know that we have a goal to reach mars by 2020 (or whenever that was).
It may be an amazing thing from an individual's viewpoint. For a set of people to accomplish what they've accomplished in the last few years. But as a country and a scientific community, I can't believe this is all we've managed in a life time.
And by the way - I think traveling from town to town over several days by horse in 1910 to landing men on the moon in 1969 is a FAR greater distance than anything between the moon in 1969 and whatever we've accomplished today.
I can't speak to the accuracy of the website (except for obvious things like you pointed out), but I know that for at least elements of the movie relating to the LRV, they talked to a lot of the engineers that designed and developed it, to get it right. And it's not easy, either... much of the work that went into those missions is either lost in massive piles of documentation or just plain lost. So I'm willing to bet the movie does a great job conveying the reality of it.
The world's only surviving livewriter.
Talking about the conspiracy... Smart-1 is suposed to be taking pictures of the moon sites http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/050304_moon_s noop.html. I wonder why are they taking so long to reveal these pictures.
When they added moderation and filtering based on mod points. What fully open, popular and free site has a better S/N ratio?
Nerds like pr0n. Where's the pr0n articles?
I'm not a Troll, it's reverse psychology.
What about the nearly 900lbs or so of verifiable moon rocks they brought back? What of all the moon dust on the spacesuits? That stuff surely didn't come from earth.
Read the wikipedia article on the moon rocks. It is a pretty interesting read.
About the van allen belts. The astronauts did indeed pass through and their experiences were interesting. One astronaut talks about closing his eyes and seeing the particles flash across his vision. It was determined that for the short period of time they would pass through, they would get minimal radiation. I suggest you actually read some of the facts about the belts and the amount of time that the astronauts spent in them.
For what its worth, I did watch the "documentary" on the moon being a fraud. It was called "We never went to the moon." It was a really good way to short circuit my reality for a day. The moon rocks themselves are pretty damning evidence along with the laser mirrors.
What's next? Will you be telling us that a navy ship disappeared from one port to reappear in another in a bizarre teleportation experiment?
zosxavius photography
To be fair, IMAX definitely can get a lot of things right - but I hate its films cavalier approach to "documentary" filmmaking. I just watched the fighter jet movie at the new Air and Space Museum in VA - there were insulting amounts of CGI that the film tries to pass off as authentic dogfight footage. All the films try to have some kind of narrative as well, which inevitably comes off as contrived.
I never understood why the IMAX people weren't one of the first ones on the ground after 9/11. That's a chance to do serious, historical documentary film work. I remember thinking that only IMAX could capture the kind of widespread devastation found in the rubble of the Trade Center.
And now, I think they should be sending people to New Orleans and Biloxy - it's a critical moment in American history that they should not overlook.