Apollo Discussions > The Hoax Theory

Yet Another Fiducials Claim

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NthBrick:
Hi all, I'm currently in the middle of an argument with somebody over on Reddit surrounding several moon landing hoax claims, and wonder if anyone would be willing to lend some expert knowledge on the "missing fiducials" claim. This person redirected me here: https://moonlandingtruth.wordpress.com/2016/08/12/photo-authenticity/

To a large degree, his argument is already weak because he hasn't demonstrated the provenance of the two fiducial-related images or verified that detail hasn't just been lost to JPEG compression, but I'm not well-versed enough in the subject to reasonably explain what is happening here. Is there some particular reason why the small black lines of the fiducials tend to get washed out in bright, white, sunlit areas of the photos (or, at least, in some copies -- the photos from Project Apollo Archive on Flickr capture all of these details beautifully as nearly as I can tell).

Peter B:
The expert photographers on the forum can probably explain better than I can, but my understanding of the reason the fiducials wash out against bright backgrounds is to do with the way photographs are developed. I don't think colour changes are instantaneous in adjacent parts of a photograph; so where you have a very bright object on a photograph next to a very dark object, there's a very narrow band between them of intermediate brightness. So when the dark object itself is also very narrow, it gets caught in that narrow band of intermediate brightness and so appears lighter than it objectively should. Then, add on low resolution scans of the photos and fine details such as the unusually lightened fiducials disappear.

As for the photos themselves, I can't identify the first one except that it's obviously from one of Apollos 15, 16 or 17. The second one I think is from Apollo 12, as that was the mission where the horizontal bar of the flagpole didn't work.

If you'd like to find the exact photos, here's my preferred method. First go to the Lunar and Planetary Institute. They have moderate quality versions of every photo, individually labelled for their unique codes, and grouped by magazine. If I know which mission a photo was taken on, it rarely takes more than a couple of minutes to find the photo, and thus its unique code. Then I go to the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal and search their photo lists for that photo, as they some very high resolution scans of photos. These scans are pretty much always able to show the fiducials, regardless of background.

NthBrick:
Thanks for the response Peter, that strikes me as entirely reasonable and is in line with what I've read so far. I found this shot from Apollo 12 (AS12-47-6953) especially interesting:



The notable thing here is that you have the same bleed-through over the brightest white surfaces of the flag, however the crosshairs still appear on the less-bright areas of the flag, which pretty neatly debunks the claim that the flag was photoshopped in after the fact. The common denominator for all of these is that they happen where the fiducial should be in front of a bright, white surface, which I would think supports the explanation of overexposure.

Being clear, as valid as these points are, he's been unwilling to grasp that the reason no manned missions to the moon have happened in over 40 years might have something to do with NASA's low funding and lack of cohesive objective by congress, so I doubt this will be convincing. I just don't like to leave claims on the table where someone could see that because I didn't bother to refute it, it's irrefutable.

Allan F:
It is the reproductive process, which degrade the analog picture. Each generation of reproduction washes details out.

What you do when you make a copy of a picture in analog form, is taking a photograph of a photograph. The process is vulnerable to sideways tranmission of light, reflections in the equipment which will lower the contrast, different types of film which will affect the dynamic range of the resulting picture.

Allan F:
Also, each picture from the Apollo mission Hasselblad cameras contain more than a GIGABYTE of information. If somebody takes a JPG of less than 100K off of the internet, they have less than 0.1% of the original picture.

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