...I am way out of my league debating with you guys and girls.
Not to seem immodest, but nearly all hoax proponents are. There's a reason why the ranks of hoax believers don't include engineers, technicians, or scientists: those professions provide the training and experience to comprehend how Apollo was accomplished, where layman does not.
I have really enjoyed reading your replies and frankly I am very surprised I haven't been removed from the site.
This is not one of those sites that sends you packing simply for disagreeing with the regulars. It's meant to entertain debate and disagreement, and the guidelines are to facilitate the debate, not to enforce a particular point of view. You get points for
why you believe something, not what.
I don't really consider myself a Conspiracy Theorist but I do think that the record of the Apollo Program and at least 75 percent of everything I learned in school about space is completely FALSE.
I don't know what you learned in school, but the Apollo program is well supported in the relevant industries and science by sound practices and principles. There is absolutely no doubt among the relevant professions that Apollo was real and happened substantially as documented. There is no suspicion among the relevant professions that the record of the Apollo development and operation has been tampered with or falsified. Those claims arise solely among a small but noisy minority who have no relevant knowledge, little interest in acquiring it, and what turns out invariably to be political and social reasons for their disbelief.
...if anyone could convince me that the official Apollo record was even close to true I would be forever indebted.
This is the group to do that, but you need to be aware that every single conspiracy theorist tells the same story. They all say that they were once staunch believers and even fans of the U.S. space program, that they were convinced by the hoax evidence, became despondent, and now wish that someone would restore their faith. The problem is that the hoax arguments are pretty clearly bunk, very easy to debunk, and that the people who came before you begging us to restore their faith usually cling pretty desperately to their hoax beliefs. That's a lot of baggage for you to have to carry, so you'll have to work hard to distance yourself from your predecessors.
If the Command Module is 400 plus Square feet I am very embarrassed.
The command module is a container within a container, as most spacecraft and aircraft are. If you fill up a swimming pool to the brim, sink a command module in it, and measure the amount of water that spills out, you'll come up with around 400 cubic feet of water. You'll get about the same volume if you go through the analytical geometry method and measure the dimensions and apply the proper formulas.
Ah, but if you opened the lid and poured water in the top, how much would you need to add before it fills up? Only 200-300 cubic feet.
How does that work? Because when you dunk the CM in a swimming pool you're measuring the total volume of the
outside container. When you pour water in the top, you're measuring the pressurized volume -- the
inner container. The difference between the 300 cubic feet inside and the 400 cubic feet outside is the space between the inner container (the pressurized crew compartment) and the outer shell.
We get the 200 cubic feet of habitable volume because some of the CM's equipment necessarily lives inside that pressurized crew compartment. All the wiring and electronics behind the control panels is part of the pressurized volume because air gets back there. But it's not part of the habitable volume because the crew can't crawl back behind the control panels. Ditto for things like storage lockers.
All the numbers mean something. To the engineer computing the buoyancy of the CM, the proper value to use would be the outside volume because he's determining the displacement and overall effective mass density of the vehicle. To the engineer designing the air scrubber, the pressurized volume is the right value because he's got to size the fans and duct work to achieve the proper gas exchange rate. To the engineers planning the cabin layout, the habitable volume is the right value.
Does anyone else on this site other than me think that the moon emits not just a little but an amazing amount of light when it (the MOON) is almost or completely full...
You're using the word "emit" wrong.
To
emit light means that the light originates there and is generated by the emitting object by means of some latent or ongoing process. Plasma does this in the form of a fire flame (ongoing combustion). Incandescent light filaments do this (ongoing response to electrical resistance heating). Phosphorescent ("glow in the dark") objects do this (latent effect). Hot metal in a furnace or forge does this (radiation of stored heat). The Moon does
not do this. The Moon does not generate visible light.
To
reflect light means that light that originated elsewhere bounces off it. All objects do this to some extent, otherwise you couldn't see them at all. That is, seeing things means seeing the light that has reflected off of it. The Moon does this. What you see in the night sky is the sunlit Moon seen against the blackness of space. You can't see the Sun because the Earth is in the way, underneath you. But where the Moon is, way out in space, the sunlight reaches it. And this reflected sunlight is what you see.
And a portion of the sunlight that's reflecting off the Earth (which is on average three times the better reflector than the Moon) strikes the part of the Moon that the sunlight isn't reaching, and then reflects back to Earth where you see it as a faint illumination of the "dark" side. As an engineer, I study and use complex interreflections such as this in the science of photometry, to determine whether designs destined for space will reflect light energy in ways that overheat the design. As a photographer, I use complex interreflections to achieve an aesthetic result.
And for the sake of completeness, to
transmit light means to let it pass completely through -- i.e., transparency or translucency. The Moon doesn't do this, but every bit of light seen coming from an object is accounted as reflection, emission, or transmission. Similarly, every bit of light striking an object goes toward reflection, absorption, or transmission. Yes, there is fluorescence, but I'm not going to go there in this post. All the light energy arriving at or leaving an object has to be accounted for in those models. Light seen coming from the Moon is reflected light only.
...and that this light would have absolutely blinded any astronaut on the surface or Spaceship orbiting the MOON!!
No.
This is simply wrong. You're considering the Moon as an emitter of light, when in fact it is only a reflector.
The only significant source of
emitted light in the solar system is the Sun. Everything we see in the solar system is visible only because we see the sunlight reflected from it.
Reckoned by planetary albedo, the Earth is almost three times a better reflector than the Moon. The light seen coming from the Earth, in orbit or faraway in space, is sunlight
reflected from Earth. The astronauts in the space station or space shuttle aren't blinded by light. Your eyes are only a couple of meters away from the Earth's surface and you aren't blinded -- well, not immediately. (Recall the plight of desert dwellers.) And that's sunlight at almost full strength (cf. atmospheric attenuation) hitting a reflector with a reflectivity index of about 30%. The Moon generally can manage only about a third of that, so whether 2 meters or 2,000 meters above it, you're simply not going to be blinded by reflect sunlight from it.
I'm not sure how to make this any clearer. You're continuing to labor under the false assumption that the Moon appears bright to you at night because it's blazing with its own light at an incredible intensity. No, that's simply wrong.
Now why does the Moon appear brighter when full? It's not just your imagination; the Moon is measured as
four times brighter when full than at half phase, not twice as bright -- the way you'd think.
This is for two reasons. First, it's a textured object. As others have told you to check, the Moon at half phase is a patchwork of bright and dark, because objects are casting shadows. Elements of the Moon's texture (hills, valleys, craters, mountains, etc.) cast shadows from the grandest mountain scale to the tinest dust particle. This cumulative effect just makes the Moon seem overall brighter or dimmer depending on phase angle. This is a property all textured objects share when used as reflectors.
Here are some photos I took.
http://www.clavius.org/shad15.htmlIn the top photos, the phase angle is large: I'm looking down over the objects while the sun is low on the horizon. The ground appears dark because a lot of it is shade and shadow. In the bottom photos I've stepped away and my line of sight is more horizontal, more along the way the light is shining. The ground appears lighter because those texture elements (i.e., the gravel) are now hiding their own shadows from me.
This is even more apparent in Figs. 5 and 6 on this page, also taken by me:
http://www.clavius.org/manmoon.htmlFrom a distance you can't see the detail in the shade or shadow; it just appears overall darker or lighter.
There's another effect. In addition to being a textured object and therefore naturally a better retroreflector, the Moon's surface is composed of a regolith (dust) that contains a high proportion of tiny glass spheres call spherules. These are formed when impacts generate a huge amount of ejected material that's very hot. As you know, glass is just heated-up and fused mineral, so these droplets of matter blasted into space by an impact cool and fall back down to the Moon's surface as perfect little transparent spheres. These have the property of preferentially reflecting light back the way they came. We use this property to make roadway paint and the paint for license plates on cars. "Reflectors" made intentionally for high visibility exploit this property that occurs naturally on the lunar surface.
