Updated PDF of “Moon Hoax: Debunked!” now available as a free download

Moon Hoax: Debunked!, my book on conspiracy theories regarding the Apollo Moon landings, is now available in an extensively updated free printable PDF edition at Moonhoaxdebunked.com.

The PDF is available both in a high-resolution version (320 MB) and in low-resolution version (34 MB) and is suitable for two-sided printing. It also includes QR codes and shortened links so that you can easily watch the videos mentioned in the text.

I wish to thank Gabriella Cordone Lisiero, who created the PDF files, for her patience and hard work.

A rarely seen photo of Neil Armstrong on the Moon is recovered: AS11-40-5894

by Paolo Attivissimo

A rarely seen Hasselblad photograph of Neil Armstrong during his historic moonwalk has been recovered better than ever before thanks to the digital restoration skills of Andy Saunders.

There are surprisingly few photographs of Neil Armstrong on the Moon: most pictures of that first moonwalk in July 1969 show his crewmate, Buzz Aldrin, since most of the time Armstrong was holding the only camera taken out on the lunar surface.

Some photographs show Armstrong partially. For example, this is AS11-40-5886:



We know it was taken by Aldrin and shows Armstrong because it is part of a sequence shot by Aldrin. Here’s a detail from that photograph:



Armstrong's legs can be glimpsed in another pair of photos, AS11-40-5895 and -5896:

AS11-40-5985.

AS11-40-5896.

Detail of AS11-40-5896.

Neil Armstrong can also be seen partially in AS11-40-5916:




He can also be seen in the reflection of Aldrin’s visor in AS11-40-5903:




Here’s an enlarged, mirror-flipped and color-corrected detail of the previous photograph:




Armstrong is also seen in the low-resolution pictures taken by the 16mm camera used to record the Apollo 11 moonwalk. This is a digital restoration of the 16mm footage, created by Andy Saunders by stacking multiple frames:

Credit: Andy Saunders / NASA.

The Apollo Lunar Surface Journal notes that NASA believed for quite a long time that it had no lunar surface photographs of the first man to set foot on the Moon. It was only in 1987 that two British researchers, H. J. P. Arnold and Keith Wilson, independently discovered that some photographs had been taken by Aldrin and therefore the astronaut depicted in those photos was Armstrong and not Aldrin as previously thought.

Andy Saunders has now recovered another Armstrong photo: AS11-40-5894, the original of which is greatly underexposed. The raw, original version is shown below.

In the bottom left corner there’s the outline of an astronaut. Since this photo was part of a sequence shot by Aldrin, the astronaut must be Armstrong.

Here's Andy Saunders’ restoration of AS11-40-5894:

And here’s a detail of Neil Armstrong, in the shadow of the Lunar Module, from Saunders’ restoration: to the best of my knowledge, this image has never been seen before with this level of clarity.

Neil Armstrong on the Moon. Credit: Andy Saunders/NASA.

A further improved restoration by Andy Saunders.

The very first image of a Lunar Module on the Moon taken from space: Apollo 15, 1971

by Paolo Attivissimo. An Italian version of this article is available. Credit for all images: NASA/LROC/Arizona State University.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter probe is well-known for its photographs of the Apollo landing sites, which in 2009 finally showed the first glimpses of the hardware left on the Moon (link) and in 2012 offered even clearer views, such as the following picture of the Apollo 15 landing site, showing the descent stage of that mission’s Lunar Module, which like all LM descent stages used for Moon landings was left on the lunar surface. The image also shows the electric vehicle (LRV) used by astronauts Dave Scott and Jim Irwin to explore the area, the experiments they set up on the Moon (ALSEP) and the trails of footsteps they left.

However, LRO did not provide the very first visual documentation of Apollo hardware on the Moon from lunar orbit: there are photographs of the Apollo 15 landing site taken from space while the astronauts were still on the Moon.

The Apollo 15 Service Module, which remained in orbit around the Moon under the control of Command Module Pilot Al Worden while Scott and Irwin explored the lunar surface, was in fact equipped with a high-resolution Panoramic Camera, which took hundreds of photographs from lunar orbit (details are here and here). Each of the long, narrow images taken by this film camera resolved surface details of 1-2 meters over an area of 320 x 20 km. These photographs have been scanned and made available online at the Apollo Image Archive of the Arizona State University.

These Panoramic Camera image scans are truly huge: the PNG Large versions measure 60,000 x 6,500 pixels. However, there are even higher-resolution versions, the raw TIFF scans, spanning a whopping 320,000 x 25,000 pixels. They are so large that the ASU has split each Panoramic Camera image into eight tiles measuring approximately 40,000 x 25,000 pixels.

AS15-P-9377 is one of the best Panoramic Camera images of the Hadley Rille landing site of Apollo 15. This is the full-width version, resized to 1024 x 109 pixels (the Hadley Rille is right in the center of this long film strip):




Maximum zoom-in on the Arizona State University website yields only barely visible shadow of the LM. You’ll probably have to click on the picture below to see it next to the tip of the arrow.




Interestingly, it turns out that ASU's maximum zoom does not provide the full resolution of the scan. For that you need to download the TIFF raw scan. Tile 4 (2 GB) of this raw scan looks like this (resized and annotated; the box indicates the landing site area):




You can now zoom in on the landing site and get this (resampled and annotated):




Rotating this image so that north is up, increasing its contrast and cropping it yields this: the complete Lunar Module (both the ascent stage and the descent stages): notice the tapering shadow. This is the very first orbital image of an Apollo LM, and it was taken while its astronauts were still on the Moon.




Thanks to the ASU data we know exactly when it was taken: on July 31st, 1971, during the sixteenth lunar orbit of the Commmand and Service Module Endeavour. In other words, about an hour after Dave Scott’s Stand-Up EVA, so Scott and Irwin were inside the LM when this photo was taken by Al Worden from an altitude of 101.22 km.

I’d like to clarify that I’m not claiming this to be my discovery: I’m merely documenting the method you can use to access these images. The Apollo Lunar Surface Journal already has this image in its Apollo 15 Map and Image Library. The ALSJ library, additionally, notes that Apollo 15 also took other pictures of the landing site showing the LM from orbit during later orbits while Scott and Irwin were still on the Moon (frame 9430, orbit 27 and frame 9798, orbit 38) and after they departed (frames 9809 and 9814, orbit 50). The photograph shown here is the very first one.

Italian branch of National Geographic posts fake Apollo photo to stir debate about alleged NASA fakery

National Geographic TV Italia, the Italian branch of National Geographic, recently posted this picture on Facebook (Donotlink; Donotlink): a photograph of a lunar horizon with a bright mark in the dark sky, captioned “Is it a star, an alien or a person on the set?”

Actually, it's just one of the many marks and blemishes that can be found on Apollo film scans. Usually they're caused by dust particles on the original film, by internal reflections of the camera lens, or by detached flakes of the Mylar coating of the Apollo spacecraft floating outside the vehicle. This is a well-known fact among Apollo experts and enthusiasts and occurs in many photographs, such as AS10-28-3990 (Apollo 10), AS14-68-9742 (Apollo 14), AS15-M-1545 (Apollo 15) or AS16-112-18218 (Apollo 16) and is most definitely not a mystery.

National Geographic TV Italia does not identify the photo in any way: no mission number, no magazine number, no photo number. Basic image analysis reveals that the sky has been heavily retouched, as indicated by the clear banding that emerges when contrast is increased even slightly.

After some rather time-consuming searching on Google and in image search engines I found this post (Donotlink) by a UFO believer, which showed a very similar image and identified its source: AS16-106-17244 (Apollo 16), shown below via Flickr.

National Geographic TV Italia's version of this Apollo 16 photo is drastically cropped, preserving only a small slice of the horizon, and the allegedly mysterious object is enlarged with respect to the moonscape. In the original image, the object is a just tiny speck in the upper right corner, as shown by the arrow below.

The original film is 70 mm wide, so the mark is extremely small on the actual film. Here is a highly enlarged detail of the region of the film that contains the mark.

Note the black dots in the lower portion of this picture: they’re specks of dust, indicating that the film was dusty when it was scanned. Presumably, the alleged “alien” or “person on set” is just another speck of dust, lit by the light of the film scanner.

In summary, National Geographic TV Italia is using a heavily doctored version of an Apollo photograph to ignite a discussion on whether NASA doctored its Apollo photographs and manufacture a clickbaiting controversy over a mote of dust. Pot, meet kettle.

Apollo 13 TV recordings

by Paolo Attivissimo. This article has been updated.

Tom McKeever, a New Jersey-based collector of space audio and video material, has granted me permission to publish some audio recordings of the US TV broadcast of the Apollo 13 mission. The recordings were made personally by Tom, using a microphone placed in front of his TV set forty years ago.

Please note there is no file 01.

02 - 13-AB prelaunch.mp3 – NBC report of launch, part one (12 min, 10 MB)

03 - 13-AC 4-11-70 launch.mp3 – NBC report of launch, part two (34 min, 31 MB)

04 - 13-AD post launch.mp3 – Unknown TV station reports TLI (5 min, 5 MB)

05 - 13-AE 4-13-70 problem reported – CBS News and NBC, shortly after accident and later progress reports. Includes at 11 min audio (recorder earlier) of the famous "OK, Houston, we've had a problem" call (28 min, 26 MB)

06 - 13AF 4-14-70 Loop-around-the moon.mp3 – (58 min, 53 MB)

07 - 13AG - Engine burn.mp3 – (14 min, 14 MB)

08 - 13AH - Burning.mp3 – (45 min, 41 MB)

09 - 13AI - 4-15-70 report.mp3 – (9 min, 8.5 MB)

10 - 13AJ - CBS.mp3 – (2 min, 1.7 MB)

11 - 13AK - Mid couse correction.mp3 – (23 min, 21 MB)

12 - 13AL - 4-16-70 Last MCC.mp3 – (18 min, 17 MB)

13 - 13AM - 4-17-70 Splashdown and recovery.mp3 – (60 min, 55 MB)

14 - 13AN - review of mission.mp3 – (40 min, 37 MB)