LRO and the Apollo Hoax Believers…

Sooner than many people expected, the first images taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter have been released – and they’re pretty stunning… click on these pics to bring up full size versions, as usual…

The images are of an area of the Moon close to Mare Nubium, and amazingly, they have a resolution 0f 3m. Three metres!! Ok, so that’s not as good as MRO’s HiRISE camera is capable of but it’s still pretty stunning, and the thing is, these are nowhere near the highest resolution images we’re going to get from LRO. The real goodies and treats will come when everything’s checked out and working properly, then we can expect to see, and drool over, images with a resolution of just half a  metre…

Half a metre. Oh, wow…

Why is that such a big deal? After all, it’s The Moon, so even at that resolution all you’re going to see are smaller and smaller craters, and big boulders, in grainy close-up, right?

Wrong. If LRO can see things half a metre across on the surface of the Moon, then it will almost certainly be able to see “things” left behind by the Apollo astronauts. By “things” I don’t mean flags and footprints, but definitely the lunar rovers, the tracks made in the lunar dust by the rovers – and, most importantly perhaps, the boxy, 4-legged descent stages of the lunar modules that landed those astronauts on the Moon all those years ago.

Is there really anyone out there who would bet against July 20th – the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing - being a massive day for NASA, which will see them releasing, with great fanfare, an LRO image showing Tranquility Base, with the Eagle’s descent stage clearly visible? Not me! Not when the picture might show something like this…

That fascinating picture is the work of one of my image mage friends on unmannedspaceflight.com, AndyG. Andy (who gave me permission to use the image here, thanks Andy! ) very cleverly simulated LRO’s view of the Apollo 15 landing site by taking a frame from the 16mm camera’s footage of the Apollo 15 ascent module and giving it the same resolution as LRO’s camera, approx 15cm per pixel. Even at that resolution you can clearly see the boxy descent stage, its four legs, and dark trails on the surface where the light lunar dust was disturbed by the astronauts. How stunning is that?!? If LRO returns an image like that of Tranquility Base I might actually shed a tear…

Inevitably, LRO’s capabilities mean many people are excited about this mission because they believe it will be a knockout blow to the “Apollo Hoax Believer” brigade, you know, the people who insist that NASA faked the Moon landings. Forums and bulletin and message boards are full of posts from Apollo supporters telling Hoax Believers (or “HB”s for short) that their time has come to an end, that NASA is about to prove, once and for all, that they did in fact send people to the Moon, and didn’t just mock the whole thing up on a sound stage deep in the American desert, like the one shown in the classic conspiracy movie CAPRICORN ONE, where NASA faked a post-Apollo manned Mars landing…

Dream on.

The HBs are never, repeat, NEVER going to be convinced that NASA went to the Moon. It doesn’t matter how many times they read, or you explain, that there were no stars in the Moon’s sky because the photos were exposed for the bright surface and foreground, so obviously teeny tiny faint starse wouldn’t be picked up by the camera. You can tell them a million times that the flags left by the astronauts aren’t “blowing in the breeze”, they’re actually flapping about because they’ve got supporting wire frames to stop them hanging there all limp and embarrassing for the photographs. They slap their hands over their ears and sing out “lalalalalala!” when you try to explain that the shadows cast by objects on the Moon look different to shadows cast by objects here on Earth because LIGHTING CONDITIONS ON THE MOON ARE NOTHING LIKE THEY ARE HERE ON EARTH!!

No. Sitting there, in their bedroom or basement, surrounded by old pizza boxes, posters of Gillian Anderson and Xena and piles of musty smelling X-Files t-shirts, HBs’ minds are totally and completely closed, so closed, in fact, that if you picked them up, flew them to the Moon and actually dropped them onto Eagle’s dusty descent stage they’d STILL insist it was just a prop, left there by an unmanned probe, and wasn’t proof that Armstrong and the others walked on the Moon..!

So trust me, when – not if, but when – NASA releases its first image of an Apollo landing site, the HBs aren’t going to be swayed an inch. They’ll dismiss them as Photoshop jobs, or insist that they aren’t detailed enough to show anything, that the feature labelled “LEM descent stage” is actually some rocks in a vaguly LM-like pattern. They’ll ask “Why, if we can see a small rover on Mars, can’t we see a huge lunar module on the Moon?” and when you patiently explain to them that MRO’s HiRISE camera is simply better than LRO’s camera, and that comparing the two probes is grossly unfair, they’ll just smile their knowing Muldur smiles and say, in that smug, self-satisfied tone they have, ”Ah ha…”, leaving you wanting to follow Buzz Aldrin’s example and sock them one.

But I’ve always though that’s the one fundamental flaw in their argument. If NASA faked it, they didn’t just fake “it”, thay had to fake it SIX TIMES! There were six succesful Moon landings, so that means they had to fake six landings, six sets of EVAs, six of everything.

Think about that.

How expensive would that have been? How complicated would that have been? How difficult would that have been?

We’ll come back to that later. In the meantime, let’s go back to basics for a moment and, taking a bright blue Stoopid pill, imagine NASA actually did fake the first Moon landing. What would that have required?

Well, it would have required that hundreds if not thousands – if not TENS of thousands – of people would have had to have been in on the secret, and have kept that secret, faithfully, to this very day. For even a single faked landing to have worked, everyone in the Astronaut Office, everyone at NASA HQ, everyone in Mission Control, every one of the astronauts themselves, would have had to be in on it and kept silence ever since.

( But they didn’t do it just the once, remember, they did it six times! More on that later… )

Come on.

Still not convinced? Sigh. Ok, then think of this. If the landings were faked, then they would have had to have been faked somewhere – our mysterious “sound stage” inside a mysterious “hangar” – so, everyone working there had to have been in on the secret. That’s every technician and engineer, every computer operator, camera man and cleaner too. Every pilot who flew people there was In On It, every driver who drove people there, too.

Look at this picture…

Now, if something like that happened, if somewhere like that was built, then how many people would have been involved? Well, that’s not a one man operation. At least a few different people would have had to build the set – the spacecraft, the landscape, etc – and build it convincingly. Someone else would have had to light it to make it look realistic for the cameras. Someone else again would have had to use those cameras to film the “Moonwalk”, and still other people would have had to broadcast those pictures to Mission Control, taking great care to adjust for the time difference, of course. And while all this was going on, other people would have had to provide security, inside the hangar and outside, to ensure no-one got in who wasn’t meant to be there. How many people are we talking to operate a joint like that, bare minimum? A dozen? Two dozen?

… and you’re telling me that not a single one of those people, 40 years on, now doesn’t desperately need money for something? Not one of them needs expensive medical treatment for one of their family? Not one of them is facing having their home reposessed or having their business taken over by the bank? If they were involved in an Apollo conspiracy, all their problems and worries could be ended in a moment, just by coming clean about what happened. It would just take one of them, just one of them, to walk into a newspaper, magazine or TV station office and hand over a grainy, creased old photo they sneakily took way back in 1969, and that would be it: cat, bag, whoosh!

To be honest, I can almost imagine such a big secret being kept for a few months back in the late 60s, maybe even for a year. The world was, after all, a hugely different, increasingly paranoid place then. People might have been convinced to play their part in such a huge conspiracy by appealing to their patriotism, by telling them that even if it meant cheating, and lying, the US had to be seen to have beaten the evil Russians to the Moon for the sake of freedom, etc…

But the world has moved on. It’s now four decades since the Apollo landings, and in that time the US and USSR have gone from being enemies to being partners. They no longer compete in space, but work together in it. That means that there’s been ample opportunity for someone to have opened the Apollo can of worms and spilled its wriggling contents all over the floor.

And then there’s basic human nature to consider, and by human nature I mean, of course, greed and stupidity

Let’s look at greed first. Today, money really does – as Liza Minelli said – make the world go round. Newspapers and magazines are happy to pay out absolute fortunes for photographs and stories that would cause shock, scandal and rewrite historty, so can you imagine how much one of them would be willing to pay for proof that the Apollo landings were faked?

The other day I saw, on the front page of a magazine, a picture of Michael Jackson, oxygen mask over his mouth, being carried into the ambulance that took him from his home after his heart attack. It was grainy, blurry, clearly taken on the sly by someone, but that didn’t matter, the magazine bought it and used it, probably paying an absolute fortune for the “privilege”. And you’re telling me that in this climate, when there’s so much money on offer for sensational pics, that not one of the people who worked on Apollo fakery is going to keep hidden away in a drawer somewhere a picture they took that would blow the whole thing wide open? Get real. They could name their price. Proof that the Apollo landings were faked would be the Biggest Story EVER, making Michael Jackson’s death look like a p26 sidebar by comparison.

And if that’s hard for you to imagine, well, consider this: even if everyone involved in the fakery is still happy to keep silent and hold on to their secrets, forty years after Apollo, NOTHING CAN BE KEPT SECRET ANY MORE. No computer records are safe from hackers, viruses and troublemakers. NASA’s own files were famously hacked into not so long ago by a British hacker looking for evidence of UFOs and captured extraterrestrials. And even leaving Neo-wannabe hackers out of it, today’s journalists have an arsenal of modern technology at their disposal, too. Modern computers and the internet mean 21st century hacks can access computer files, scan databases and search records with ease. They have “sources” and “insiders” everywhere, in every agency, company and organisation. If there are secrets to be found, they will be found. So I cannot believe for a moment that if any aspect of Apollo had been faked, a journalist somewhere wouldn’t have uncovered it by now.

I mean, come on, in the US journalists have uncovered countless political scandals, financial and extramarital, which have led to the resignations of high profile politicians. Over here in the UK a daily newspaper recently shookthe political establishment to its very foundations by revealing details of the extravagant and some would say downright criminal expenses claims made by members of the British Parliament. Is it really possible that a faked Moon landing could have stayed secret for so long? Get real!

Then there’s just the sheer klutzy nature of human beings in positions of power to be considered.

People are, generally speaking, idiots. I don’t mean that nastily, I just mean that if they can mess something up, people usually will. That’s why in the past few years there have been countless scandals here in the UK involving lost Government and military laptops, data sticks and files. People have left them on buses, on trains, even in the street. Details – names, addresses, bank records – of tens of thousands of people have gone astray. It’s a long shot, I know, but I can’t help thinking that just because of the cruel, impishly mischevious nature of the universe, if the secrets of a staged Apollo program are hidden somewhere they would have been lost by some poor sap, and found again by – or passed on to - some gleeful journalist, by now.

And if none of those arguments have convinced you, then what about the role of the Russians in all this? Does anyone really think that with their enormous network of spies and surveilance equipment back in the 1960s and 70s, having been beaten in the Space Race, the Russians wouldn’t have uncovered The Truth and told EVERYONE? They’d have been desperate beyond words to embarrass and humiliate the US! Make no mistake, if Apollo had been faked, the Russians WOULD have found out and they would definitely, I’m 10000000% sure, have shouted out “Liars! Liars! Pants on fire!” from the top of the Kremlin’s highest, pointiest tower, as soon as possible.

None of those things has happened, of course, which means one of two things is possible: either a) the Moon landings happened, and the HBs are mistaken/deluded/idiots, or b) the Moon landings were faked, and the HBs have been right all along, and we’re the ones who are mistaken and/or deluded.

What have they got to say about it? Here are a couple of HB classics for you, mined from various websites…

Why does this rock have a letter ‘C’ on it? There is also a ‘C’ on the ground in front of the rock. The use of the letter C on film props is well known by the people in Hollywood and is used to show where the centre of the scene should be.

Neil Armstrong never talks about the Apollo landings. That’s because he’s stricken with conscience. Proof positive that we didn’t go to the moon. 

Aaaggghhh!!!! SLAP!

But back to what I think is the real deal-clincher for people who insist the Apollo landings actually happened – that NASA did the whole thing more than once. Actually, not “just” six times, as I said before, but SEVEN TIMES, because there were seven Saturn V launches, in full view of the world. Think about that. Even if everything after them was a fake, they still launched seven bloody great rockets, each costing a frakking fortune. Why? Why bother? With Russia’s rocket already blown to bits, if I was Head of NASA at the time, and I was determined to fake it, for whatever reason, I’d have launched Apollo 11 and had them “abort” at the last minute because of some “technical problem” and then pause the whole program while that “fault” was fixed, deadline be damned. Or I’d have shut down the Apollo program AFTER Apollo 11 because with the successful landing of Eagle in the Sea of Tranquility that was it, NASA’s job was done, they’d beaten Kennedy’s deadline. Why go another six times? Why spend all that money? Why risk those astronauts? Why not just land one crew then say “Ok, we did it. Our work here is done.”?

It doesn’t make sense.

That’s all in the past though. Today, as the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11’s triumphant landing on the Moon approaches,  NASA is preparing to go Back To The Moon, and LRO is the first stage of that return. And, depressingly and inevitably, already the HBs and conspiracy fans are denouncing the mission, saying that its pictures won’t prove the Apollo missions took place because they will either be doctored or faked altogether to show things that aren’t there. A quick Google search will bring up outrageous claims that would be comic if they weren’t so pathetic. One posted comment – referring to the lack of cameras onboard recent unmanned Moon orbiters powerful enough to resolve Apollo hardware – on Phil Plait’s popular (but, unfortunately, frequently troll-infested) BAD ASTRONOMY blog for Discover magazine is typical of the **** out there. Referring to the lack of cameras onboard recent unmanned lunar probes with sufficient resolution to resolve Apollo hardware, he says:

Nevertheless, they did suspiciously fail to send cameras of sufficient power to resolve and independently verify Apollo landing site remnants. It’s absurd that none sent such a camera when any and all should have.Very strange until you recognize it all as a hoax.

Funnily enough, that was written by the very same Hoaxer who made this confident prediction as the day of LRO’s launch approached…

I predict a major malfunction of LRO. Silence is an easy cover for lies.

Oops. Didn’t quite turn out that way, eh?!

 So no, in a couple of weeks, when NASA releases to the world an LRO portrait of the Apollo 11 landing site it won’t bury the Apollo Hoax conspiracy theories, as much as we’d all like it to. Despite the heart-stoppingly huge expense, the possibility of being exposed to the world as liars and cheats, and the condemnation of future generations if discovered, NASA faked the whole Apollo adventure, the Hoaxers just won’t be told otherwise. And nothing, absolutely nothing, is going to convince them that six pairs of great clod-hopping astronaut boots really did crump down into the lunar dust for all Mankind between 1969 and 1972.

That used to frustrate and bug the hell out of me. For a long, long time if an HB spouted off to me – or even if someone innocently brought up the subject at a party or something – I would do a very convincing impression of Bilbo Baggins turning into Evil Bilbo in LORD OF THE RINGS – gritted teeth, clenched fists, the works. And believe me, if I had been granted a superpower it would have been to have the ability to round up each and every HB, transport them to Tranquility Base, slam them bodily against the Eagle’s descent stage and scream into their pasty, computer-monitor bleached faces “SEE??? SEE THALL THIS STUFF?!?!? WHO DO YOU THINK PUT IT HERE?!?!? LOOK! WE WENT TO THE MOON, OK!?!?!? STOP IT!!!!”

Now I can’t be bothered.

After all, they’re a minority, and what they think really doesn’t matter. Truth, and common bloody sense, is on our side, not theirs, and I’ve come to realise that absofrakkinglutely nothing will ever change their minds. So I just let them get on with it, and if someone brings up the subject during one of my Outreach talks I make a quick slap-down defence and leave it at that. I really can’t be bothered. In my mind we’ve already won the argument.

Which is why I’m not sitting here getting excited about the (surely) imminent LRO images if Tranquility Base thinking “They’ll prove the HBs wrong once and for all!” because, simply, they won’t. No. I’m excited about seeing them because they will be postcards of a familiar place. A place we should never have left in the first place.

A place we will go back to.

It’s ISS-spotting season again…

Want to know when you can see the ISS in the sky? I’ve updated my Space Station page with details of July’s opportunities…

http://cumbriansky.wordpress.com/space-station-spotting

Volcanic sunset…

If you’re a regular visitor to the excellent website “Spaceweather.com” you’ll know that lots of people around the world are enjoying beautiful sunsets at the moment. Why? Well on June 12th a volcano in Russia, called “Sarychev Peak”, erupted, sending huge amounts of smoke, ash, dust and gas up into the air. The eruption was photographed a window-hogging by astronaut looking down from the International Space Station…

Since then the volcanic material has been swirling around the globe, in great teased-out plumes and streamers. It’s not dangerous, but people living in areas where a plume has passed over them at just the right time have been seeing gorgeous sunsets and dusks. There’s a whole gallery of pictures up on Spaceweather.com, showing sunsets painted pink and violet and lavendar, with subtle streaks of coloured cloud glowing in the west…

I’ve been reading for the past week how one way to tell in advance if YOU might see a “volcanic sunset” yourself is to look for horizontal streaks of pale white/grey cloud in the western sky before the Sun has even set. That means there’s volcanic material above you, and there’s a chance you might see something pretty after sunset. Well, during a visit to my mum up in Cockermouth on Friday night that’s just what Stella and I saw..!

The cloud streaks are definitely there! A little while later, when the Sun had actually set, there was even more to see in the sky…

You can see now how the cloud streaks have become tinged pink and red. To be honest, at first I wasn’t sure that they weren’t just ”normal” sreaks of cirrus cloud, but photos on Spaceweather.com labelled as “Volcanic sunset clouds” show exactly the same thing, so I’m claiming them!

A little later still, this is the sunset we saw… not as dramatic or garish as those seen elsewhere in the world, but still pretty, I think…

Will we see some more beautiful Sarychev sunsets? We’ll just have to wait and see..!

It’s Carnival time again… :-)

We all have busy lives. There are so many demands on our time now that it’s hard, if not impossible, to keep up with all the good stuff on t’internet. Oh, if only there was a site you could go to where the best of the week’s space and astronomy blogging was gathered togethet in one place -

Wait, there is! It’s called the “Carnival of Space”! Every week a different space- or astronomy-related blog hosts an online reading group party, where posts from a dozen or so blogs are gathered together for an all you can eat buffet of tasty spacey treats.

This week’s Carnival is being hosted by the “Twisted Physics” blog, and you can find it just by following this link…

http://blogs.discovery.com/twisted_physics/2009/06/carnival-of-space-109.html

Admission is free, and everyone there is friendly, so what are you waiting for? Go take a look! I understand there’s a great post this week about how ridiculous is is that Neil Armstrong’s “One Small Step” wasn’t documented better…

The Night of the Lost Moon…

So. My plan last night was – after getting home from work – to get my telescope out, head up to Kendal Castle, and have a good Moon-gazing session. The main aim of the evening was to see, and maybe even get a photo of, the Apollo 11 landing site in the Sea of Tranquility. But all day the clouds came and went, and after a half-hearted thunderstorm at teatime the clouds only partly cleared, and by the time I got home the Moon was playing hide and seek with banks of low cloud in the west… didn’t look good. In the end, rather than trek up the hill to the castle I elected to stay at ground level, in Abbot Hall Park and try observing from there. Conditions were pretty poor, and the ****** midges that swarmed around me in the muggy heat didn’t help, but eventually the Moon swam into view…

… but it was way, waaay too misty and murky to see the Apollo 11 site, or even pin it down with any level of confidence, so I quickly gave up on that. Another time. Instead, when the Moon briefly emerged from behind the worst of the cloud, I took a couple of pics, just by holding my digital camera up to the eyepiece and clicking away at various settings until something worth saving was taken. Ah, the joys of digital, no more worrying about wasting film…!

Anyway, here’s the best of the pics… click to enlarge, of course…

I’m quite pleased with those; you can see a fair amount of detail, considering it was a horrible night for observing.

Apollo Outreach…

Thanks to collectSPACE.com for adding my July 17th Apollo talk – at Kendal Library – to their guide to everything that’s going on to commemorate the anniversary…

NASA’s Return To The Moon has begun…

Earlier today, something very, very important happened. The world changed – not in a huge way, not in a way that shook houses, or knocked plates off shelves, or made dogs howl in the street. In fact, unless you were a space geek, watching it live online, you wouldn’t have realised anything was happening at all. It wasn’t front page news for papers and magazines, it wasn’t the lead story on Sky News or CNN, but earlier today, just short of 40 years after Armstrong and Aldrin stepped onto its dusty surface, a quarter of a million miles away, NASA finally Returned to the Moon.

Not with people. That won’t happen for another decade, probably a decade and a half I reckon. Today NASA returned to the Moon with cameras, computers and instruments packed neatly and lovingly into a pair of unmanned spacecraft – LRO and LCROSS – that will, together, help us get to know the Moon well enough to begin planning how to stage the manned missions NASA is wanting to stage in the next decade and beyond.

The probes were launched last week, onboard a single, powerful rocket, and since then have been travelling to the Moon. Earlier today the LRO spacecraft – essentially a lunar version of the “spy satellite” like Mars Reconaissance Orbiter that has, with its incredibly high resolution HiRISE camera, revolutionised our view of Mars by allowing us to see objects on its surface just a metre across – went into orbit around the Moon, and now its mission scientists can look forward to seeing the Moon’s surface in almost unbelievable detail when the probe’s cameras are calibrated and turned on the Moon at the beginning of next month.

How good will LRO’s pictures be? Well, with a resolution of 50cm, the cameras will, it is confidently predicted, be able to spot Apollo hardware standing on the Moon’s surface, such as the descent stages of the Apollo lunar modules, and even the famous lunar rovers used on the last three Apollo missions…!

LRO went into lunar orbit this morning, to great cheers and applause from its understandably relieved team. A few hours later, the LCROSS spacecraft – which is designed to crash into the Moon later this year, in the hope of detecting deposits of water ice beneath its surface – began its first fly-by of the Moon, and the event was shown live on the internet, with live streaming video being beamed back by the spacecraft and shown on the web in realtime for all to see.

I’m not sure how many people watched it, but I hope lots did, because it was a fantastic event. Ok, so the picture quality was a bit poor, but that’s not the point. The point is that anyone who wanted to could go online and essentially see the Moon through the spacecraft’s point of view, as if they riding on the back of it. Here’s the view we were treated to…

On the left was the live feed from LCROSS, on the right a computer simulation showing the spacecraft’s position relative to the Moon. That meant we were able to follow the spacecraft’s rolling, pitching and yawing as it maneouvred whilst taking pictures, which was pretty cool. The view wasn’t spectacular, the Moon was a bit blurry, a bit fuzzy and over-exposed…

… but again, that wasn’t the point. The point was we were seeing the Moon LIVE, from a spacecraft flying around it!

… just like the Apollo crews did, all those years ago.

So, that’s it. NASA has finally, after all the plans and proposals, reviews and recommendations, hopes and dreams, returned to the Moon. There is actually, after all the hot air and fancy talk, equipment in orbit around the Moon that is designed to help NASA eventually send people back to the Moon to continue the work of the Apollo astronauts.

Hubble poems…

I am VERY honoured to have my poems inspired  by the recent Hubble Servicing Mission featured on the Hubble Heritage website!

http://heritage.stsci.edu/commonpages/art/literature/index.html

Carnival of Space time again..!

Yes, the latest CARNIVAL OF SPACE – #108 -  is now available for you to read. So go to the fantastic “STARTS WITH A BANG!” blog to catch up on the best of the week’s space blogging!

http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2009/06/carnival_of_space_108_solstice.php

One small step for (a) man… alas, one giant FAIL for Mankind

Welcome to Carnival of Space #109 readers!

Someone asked me the other day “When do you think they’ll actually invent a time machine?” After my initial deep, patient sigh of despair, I actually realised something important and told my friend “They already did, centuries ago. It’s called a camera…”

And that’s true, isn’t it? Cameras allow us to freeze time and re-live and enjoy all over again key moments in our lives. The birthdays of our kids, weddings, holidays; all events that can be immortalised forever – now even more easily than ever thanks to the cheapness of digital cameras. Cameras have also captured, in years gone by, key events in history, and allow us – in the absence of a crazily-spinning, brass HG Wells time machine – to travel back and witness those events.

Take a look at these pictures (click the image to enlarge it – come on, you know how this works by now! ) …

Can you imagine how terrible it would have been if those key momemts in history hadn’t been captured? And they’re just the ones I could find quickly, between coffees, on Google. There must be thousands of images of the signings of war treaties, of coronations and hundreds of other subjects Out There. Some of those images were staged, of course, the people in them posed and arranged specifically to make a good photograph, but that doesn’t matter. Many more were just a case of a guy or girl with a camera being in the right place at the right time. However they were taken, and why, we should all be very grateful that there was a photographer on hand to grab those moments and preserve them.

Of course, some epic moments in Mankind’s history were missed because they occurred before the invention of the camera. When time machines are eventually developed, there’ll be a huge demand I am sure for pictures of legendary events from the Deep Past. Who wouldn’t want to see a photograph of the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs? Which magazine or newspaper editor wouldn’t pay a fortune to send a photographer back in time to capture on a memory card the exact moment that Columbus first stepped onto American soil -well, sand? Which amateur astronomer worth his or her salt wouldn’t love to see a 6Mb image of the cataclysmic impact that formed the Moon? How many historians would say “no” to a picture of Galileo turning that telescope on the sky for the first time, or Newton writing in his notebook about apples? How many archaeologists wouldn’t weep at the thought of seeing for themselves the moment our earliest human ancestors walked upright for the first time?  Maybe one day.

My point is, photographs are important to Mankind. They’re our witnesses and our judges, our Q’s if you like – proof that we can be both stupid and brilliant, timid and bold, ambitious and pathetic.

Which is why, as the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11 approaches like a runaway steam train, I’m getting more and more angry that the greatest event in the history of mankind, the first footsteps taken on an alien world by a member of the human race, weren’t recorded better. Or, more specifically, that the first man on the Moon, Neil Armstrong, was photographed so pathetically.

This subject has come up before, of course, countless gazillion times, and I’m sure many people are absolutely sick to the back teeth of it. But I can’t help it, it really, REALLY winds me up that the greatest achievement of Mankind – after the invention of the Crunchie, of course – wasn’t preserved on film in the way it should have been.

Some questions for you. Do you know how many still images – that is, images taken during the Apollo 11 EVA - there are actually showing Neil Armstrong standing on the surface of the Moon? Five. Do you know how many of those images show Armstrong’s whole body? One. Do you know how many of those five images actually show Neil Armstrong’s face? None.

That, surely, is a massive Fail.

What the hell happened?!?! Really, what the frak were they thinking?!?!?!?!? This was clearly the one part of the whole Apollo mission that wasn’t rocket science. Didn’t at least one person get it? Didn’t someone think to stand up in a meeting and say “Listen guys… first man on moon = IMPORTANT! It will change EVERYTHING… History will forevermore be divided into pre-Apollo and post-Apollo, so we should make sure that we get a great photo of the first person to stand on the Moon, whoever it is. We’ll never get another shot at this, and we’ll look like bloody idiots in years to come if we mess it up, so for God’s sake set aside just a minute for Aldrin to take a photo of Armstrong next to the flag, or at the foot of the ladder, or standing beneath the Earth – something to go on the cover of LIFE.“..?

Obviously no, that never happened, because there was no “official” picture taken of Armstrong on the Moon, just a handful of images that, frankly, look like they were taken by a 7yr old kid with a £20 digital camera when he and his mates were playing “Lets pretend to be astronauts”. 

Why? Well, being charitable, everyone’s human I guess, and to be fair it was a crazy time, a time before the PR gurus reigned, so I perhaps… maybe… possibly… it might just be down to bad pre-planning by the Apollo mission managers. It might just be down to the enormous pressure put on the astronauts to use every second wisely during their EVA. It might be that the people in charge of the mission were so busy trying to ensure the Apollo 11 crew actually survived their lunar voyage that they gave little thought to how significant it was going to be.

I was quite prepared to believe this until the other day when, reading James R Hansen’s excellent biography of Neil Armstrong, “First Man”, I read what Chris Kraft – ther Director of Flight Operations – said about Armstrong:

“Look, we just knew damn well that the first guy on the Moon was going to be a Lindbergh. We said to ourselves ‘He’s going to be a Lindbergh… He’s going to be the guy for time immemorial that’s going to be known as the guy that set foot on the Moon first… The first man on the Moon would be a legend, an American hero beyond Lucky Lindbergh, beyond any soldier or politician or inventor.”

Hmmm. Maybe, if you knew he was going to be so important, so famous, so significant, you should have made sure there was a decent photo taken of him then, eh?

There’s another theory, of course, a rather less palatable one. Some people have have suggested it might have been a deliberate act of revenge by a sulky Buzz Aldrin who, it was widely known, really, really wanted to be the first person down the ladder… I don’t want to believe that, I really don’t. It would be so petty, so dishonourable. And from what I’ve read about Buzz, and from the interviews I’ve seen and heard with him, I have a really hard time believing such a professional would behave like that. But hey, human beings – especially hacked off human beings – are peculiar creatures. You never know what they’re capable of if pushed.

We’ll probably never know the reason why Armstrong’s presence on the Moon was so pathetically documented. All I know is that it bugs the hell out of me, always has done, always will. It naws at me like a rat gnawing on a bone, and that’s the truth.

If I had a working time machine right now I would crank it up, send myself back to 1969, break down the door of one of the Apollo surface ops planning meetings and tell them all “Make sure you take more photos of the astronauts working on the Moon, especially Armstrong, because trust me, if you don’t, in forty years time a lot of people  are going to be scratching their heads wondering how you could have messed up so badly.”

It wouldn’t happen now, of course. The world has moved on, and everyone appreciates the power of the image. I have no doubt that if the Moon landings were happening right now, NASA would have already built into the Apollo 11 astronauts’ lunar EVA timeline several periods of simply photographing each other, and photographing each other properly, after some serious thought had been given to the best poses and locations. You see, the modern NASA realises – and clearly embraces – both the public’s insatiable desire for “pretty pictures” and the need to ensure key events in history, not just “space history”, are recorded properly. That’s why so many beautiful images come out of each space shuttle mission now, why many of the images taken by the Mars rovers look like professionally composed tourist postcards, and why the launches of missions such as LRO are photographed so beautifully and dramatically by photographers like Ben Cooper, whose launch pad shots are never less than inspiring.

And when the first person sets foot on Mars, you can be absolutely 100000% certain that even though the outside of the lander will be covered with cameras, recording each and every fraction of a second of the EVA in high definition, from a dozen different angles, there will be a few precious minutes set aside for the second astronaut down the ramp or ladder to take pictures of the first astronaut down the ramp or the ladder, posing beside the flag, visor up, smiling, for the sake of history.

But look back at the Apollo archives and you could be forgiven for thinking that Buzz Aldrin was bouncing and bounding around on his own at Tranquility Base in July 1969. Which is, I personally think, almost criminally negligent on someone’s part.

Because let’s be clear about this. There will never, ever be another moment as significant as that moment when Neil Armstrong first set foot on the Moon. That was the moment when – albeit briefly – Mankind became a multi-planet, spacefaring species, the moment when one of its number stood on the surface of another world for the very first time.

As I write this I’m watching – on and off – the episode of the HBO series “FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON” where Apollo 11’s landing is depicted so wonderfully. The Eagle just landed, barely a few moments ago, and I’m not ashamed to admit that tears welled up in my eyes as I watched that scene, just as they have done every single time before. It brought home to me, yet again, what an amazing achievement it was. It also brought home to me how unique an achievement it was, too. You see, one day, maybe around 2030 or so,  a man or woman will make history and set foot on Mars, and the world will cheer and I will cry my eyes out, but they will be following in Armstrong’s footsteps. One day in a few centuries’ time another man or woman will make history by setting foot on the surface of a planet orbiting another star, far out in space, but they will still be in standing Armstrong’s shadow. And one day, in the far, far future, a man or woman will reach out with their foot to stand on the surface of a world orbiting a star in another galaxy… but as they stand there, looking up at the alien sky, seeing the Milky Way as an elongated smudge of light barely as wide as their fingernail, they will know, they will feel, that all those millennia before them, a man called Neil Armstrong stood on the surface of the Moon as the first human being to set foot on another world…

…and no-one thought to make sure his picture got taken properly.

Does this matter, really? Yes, I think it does. We literally lost a piece of our species’ history because of that. If you don’t agree, then that’s fine, this is after all a very personal thing for me, but just take a moment to ask yourself if it isn’t simply, fundamentally wrong that this iconic image shows not the first man on the Moon, but the second…

But we are where we are. We don’t have a time machine, I can’t go back to those meetings and tell The Powers That Be to ensure that Armstrong’s picture is taken on the Moon, nor can I – as I really, really want to – jump in a TARDIS, land on the Moon at the moment after that picture was taken and tell Aldrin “Go get the damned camera, and take a picture of Neil just like the one he took of you…” What have we actually got?

Well, I’ve been researching this, and – as is commonly known, it’s not something I’ve “discovered” – there are just five pictures of Armstrong outside Eagle, on the Moon’s surface. Here they are, in the order in which they were taken.

And trust me, if this hasn’t annoyed you before, it’s about to.

That’s image AS11-40-5886.

That’s image AS11-40-5894. If you’re thinking “Where is he?” Neil Armstrong is that blurry, under-exposed, shadowy figure on the far left. You can just see his helmet. Then we have…

That’s image AS11-40-5895. At the top centre you can just see Armstrong’s body from the waist down… Then we have…

That’s image AS11-40-5896, which doesn’t even show Armstrong’s whole lower body, just his legs. And finally, take a look at…

That’s image AS11-40-5916, with a well-focussed, well0-exposed view of half of Armstrong’s backpack and his right leg.

There you have it. Those are THE images of Neil Armstrong during the Apollo 11 moonwalk. That’s it. That’s all we’ve got. Let’s take a slightly closer, tweaked look at those pictures. These are crops and enhancements I’ve made from those original images. (Other people have made far superior versions, I know, but I wanted to have a go myself.)

Sigh.

Actually, there are two more images of Neil Armstrong on the Moon, but they were taken inside the Eagle lunar module after he and Aldrin had clambered back inside at the end of their EVA…

That’s image AS11-37-5528, and then, finally, there’s image AS11-37-5529…

… so there you have it. Ok, let’s be charitable and say there are actually seven sharp, still photographs of Neil Armstrong on the Moon.

Seven.

Now, I don’t know about you, but that really p’s me off. It’s just not right. Why it happened, I don’t know. But I personally resent Mankind not having a good photograph of the First Man On The Moon to use to show just what greatness we achieved once, and can reach out for again in the future.

Just imagine, for a moment, how you’d feel if important events in history had been commemorated by these photographs…

The Wright Brothers’ first flight…

The loss of the Hindenberg…

Scott reaches the pole after Amundsen…

Shackleton’s HMS Endurance becomes trapped in the ice…

And those events were nowhere near as important as the first Moon landing.

Of course, there are lots more images of Neil Armstrong on the Moon than those seven stills, but they’re all screengrabs and scans taken from the jerky footage shot by a trio of movie and television cameras used on the mission. Freezing frames of the footage taken by the 16mm camera mounted above and pointed out of one of the lunar module’s famous triangular windows gets you images like this…

… and there are the famous images that everyone is familiar with, frames from the blurry, streaked footage of Armstrong descending and stepping off Eagle’s ladder, taken by the TV camera mounted on the boxy MESA payload that Armstrong deployed after shuffling backwards out onto Eagle’s porch…

Finally we can also grab frames like this from the footage taken by a small TV camera Armstrong deployed a short distance in front of Eagle…

( That’s a screengrab I took and played about with skilfully enhanced, showing, on the far right, Armstrong sending one of the boxes of priceless collected Moon rocks up into the LEM.)

… but I think by now you’ll agree that it’s unbelievable to think that there are no better images of Armstrong on the Moon than those. It makes me want to put my fist through this screen, to be perfectly honest!

Having said that, that’s not the end of the story. There are other images “out there”, lurking, hidden away in boxes, archives and cracks in the dusty walls of the internet’s deepest, darkest dungeons.

For a start, there are the famous “Honeysuckle Creek pictures”, which are essentially photographs taken of TV monitors in the control room of the 26m Honeysuckle Creek dish in Australia, which received signals from the Moon at the same time as the 64m Deep Space Network dish at Goldstone in California and the 64m Parkes dish in Australia. To cut a very long story short, the pictures that went out on TV from NASA, received by the Goldstone dish, were of much poorer quality than the pictures received in Australia because the Goldstone footage was sent to Houston via a landline, so it was considerably degraded by the time it was broadcast to the world. However, the monitors at Honeysuckle Creek were showing much higher quality footage, and realising this one of the techs there photographed them, thus preserving the best quality images to be returned during Armstrong’s historic descent down the ladder and his initial moonwalk -

Probably easier if I show you, eh?

Left: pic broadcast from Houston using Goldstone feed. Right: the images being received at Honeysuckle Creek. Big difference!

Here are some more screengrabs from the Honeysuckle Creek monitors, copyright of and taken from the excellent Honeysuckle Creek Apollo 11 website.

And over the years, spaceflight enthusiasts have inevitably turned their attention on the old Apollo images and tried to squeeze something new out of them, too.

It was thought for a long time that the “best” image of Neil Armstrong on the Moon was actually to be found in that previously mentioned “iconic” image of Buzz Aldrin taken by Armstrong himself. What? Well, scroll back up the page a little to the image, and if you look closely you can see an elongated bright streak in Aldrin’s visor… that is actually the reflection of Neil Armstrong as he took the famous picture! If you take a crop of the visor, tweak and enhance it, you get something like this…

Now, that’s really a very special image. Not only does it show Armstrong standing on the Moon, it also shows the US flag, the LEM and, at the top of the picture, Earth too!

Just think what that image would have looked like if Aldrin had bounced over to Armstrong, taken the 70mm Hasselblad camera off him, and taken the picture properly… What a fine and fitting portrait that would have been.

Well, maybe we’ll come back to that idea later…

It is no surprise that Neil Armstrong’s “small step” has inspired many artists since 1969, and in a way their paintings have been the best “images” of the great day we’ve had. Countless artists have immortalised Armstrong’s first footfall on the Moon, among them the Apollo astronaut/artist Alan Bean, who has created several works celebrating it.

This painting by Bean accurately depicts how Armstrong would have looked while taking that famous, iconic image of Aldrin… and in a neat flip-around, if you look closely you can see Buzz Aldrin reflected in Armstrong’s visor…

Neil Armstrong, as everyone knows, is not a hoopin’ and a hollerin’ kind of guy. But Alan Bean painted a great picture depicting what it might have been like if Armstrong had let his hair down to celebrate the succesful first lunar landing…

In his own unique and loved style, the great American painter Norman Rockwell also immortalised Neil Armstrong’s first footfall on the Moon…

But y far my favourite Apollo 11-inspired painting is one by Paul Calle. Calle was the artist who designed the official stamp commemorating the landing of Eagle on the Moon…

 

Calle’s dramatic painting “The Great Moment” is exactly the picture that should have been taken as Armstrong stepped onto the Moon’s surface for the first time…

Isn’t that gorgeous? Don’t you wish we had that picture of Armstrong to use? Aah well, that just wasn’t possible – the camera wasn’t of high enough quality, it couldn’t be put into that position… maybe some images are best left imagined.

Back to actual photographs of Armstrong on the surface. The famous “visor” reflection was the “best photo of Armstrong on the Moon” until recently when fames Apollo historian and fan Andrew Chaikin – who wrote “A Man On The Moon”, the book which was the inspiration for “From The Earth To The Moon” – revealed to the world a picture he had made by scanning frames of that aforementioned 16mm film and enhancing it with the latest techniques to bring out previously hidden details. Andy came up with this image, which features in his new book “Voices From The Moon” (and thanks to Andy again for giving me permission to reproduce it here on Cumbrian Sky)…

Wow… look at that… you can actually see Armstrong’s face! It’s clearly there, through his visor…

That’s him, that’s the First Man on The Moon! How cool is that? Finally, FINALLY, thanks to Andy Chaikin’s hard work, we have a picture of Neil Armstrong on the Moon that actually does him justice.

…well, kind of. It’s still blurry, and we can only just see his face. It’s hardly a portrait is it? It’s not the picture that could have been taken – and should have been taken – not by a long shot.

I decided to do something about that.

It all began with a simple, nagging question: what if…?  What if, after taking that iconic image of Aldrin, Armstrong had decided it was his turn, that it was only right for him to have his picture taken there on the Moon too?

I invite you now to imagine an alternative timeline for the Apollo 11 EVA. In this timeline Armstrong has just taken That Picture, and Aldrin is starting to turn away to get on with their scheduled activities.

Armstrong: Just a moment Buzz, come over here will you? You need the camera.

Aldrin: I do? That’s not on my checklist.

Armstrong: No, it’s not, but I would like a picture of me too. I’m sure no-one would mind. Do you? We have time.

Aldrin: Okay…

Aldrin bounces over to Armstrong, takes the camera, and bounces back a short way.

Armstrong: Back a little further Buzz… there you go. That’s fine. Wait while I lift this up… ( Armstrong lifts the protective outer visor of his helmet, allowing his face to be seen…) Ok, go ahead…

And click…

Oh, how I wish things had happened that way.

This has turned into a bit of a rant, hasn’t it? I didn’t mean it to, that’s just the way it’s turned out. I certainly don’t want anyone reading this to think it’s an anti-Aldrin diatribe, it’scertainly not that, I have only the greatest of respect for him. There’s no point in trying blame him or anyone else for what happened, it’s history now. But the inescapable truth is that the photographic record of what is surely one of the most important events – if not THE most important event – in our species’ history is woefully inadequate, as it does not include a good, appropriate picture of the first member of the human race to set foot on another world.

So what can we do?

Well, the moment is gone, lost in the swirling mists of history. We can never get it back, never replay it, never repeat it. I don’t have a time machine, so I can’t, even though I desperately want to, go back in time and change history so that a good picture of Armstrong was taken.

But I do have Photoshop, and Google, and a lot of patience and imagination, and most importantly a burning desire to have a decent “portrait” image of Neil Armstrong standing on the Moon to use and enjoy, and share with other people – something worthy of showing in the many Outreach talks I give in schools and community centres and drafty church halls here in England.

So I sat down, cracked the old knuckles over the keyboard and got to work, looking to make something that was obviously fictional, but plausible; something that looked fairly accurate, if not photo-realistic; a photograph that, had I been Armstrong, I would have made damn sure Buzz Aldrin took of me.

…and after a lot of cutting, pasting, cropping, burning, dodging and layering, cups of tea and Crinkle Crunch biscuits, I came up with this…

I know others could do better. I know that my picture’s a million light years away from realistic. There are mistakes, inaccuracies and impossibilities in it by the dozen. You know what? I don’t care. I did it for me, and all the people who, like me, wish things had been different. So no, it’s not perfect, but I humbly suggest that it’s the kind of picture that should have been taken on the Moon, and printed in all the space and astronomy magazines and books, and featured on websites, for the past 40 years.

In my alternative timeline, things were different. After posing for his photo, Buzz Aldrin took the camera off Armstrong, when they got back to Earth this was on the shelves of newsagents everywhere…

I hope you like it.