• Question: Do you think that the moon landings were real or faked?

    Asked by JAMIES to Heather, Helen, Hugh, Jane, Julian on 12 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Heather Campbell

      Heather Campbell answered on 12 Nov 2014:

      Real, definitely!

      We now bounce microwave signals off the dished on the moon that the astronauts who landed there put in place. We wouldn’t be able to do that if people hadn’t actually landed there.

    • Photo: Julian Onions

      Julian Onions answered on 12 Nov 2014:

      I’m fairly sure they are real.
      Lots of reasons, but two main ones.
      1. There were thousands of people involved in the apollo program, you can’t keep a secret amongst that many people.
      2. The left reflectors on the moon, and with the right equipment you can shine laser up to the moon and bounce them off these reflectors if you hit just the right spot.

      We’ve also seen pictures of the landing sites now with the lunar orbiter.

    • Photo: Helen Johnson

      Helen Johnson answered on 12 Nov 2014:

      Definitely real! Have you seen the episode of Big Bang Theory where Sheldon shines a laser off the reflectors we left on the moon? This is the main ‘proof’ I think.

Comments

  • Photo: JAMIES

    JAMIES commented on :

    But why are there no stars in any of the photos of the landing?

  • Photo: JAMIES

    JAMIES commented on :

    @Helen What Series and episode of the Big Bang Theory was that? I would like to see that.

  • Photo: Julian

    Julian commented on :

    There are no stars because when they landed it was daylight. The moon was being lit by the sun, so everything was pretty bright.

    Therefore when you take a picture the shutter speed would be a fraction of a second, so maybe 1/60 to 1/500th of a second.

    To get stars to show up needs exposures of a few seconds as a minimum, so thats why no stars show up, pretty much the same reason you don’t see stars in any pictures on Earth during the day.

    Even if you take a 5 second exposure pointing at the sky, you can’t see stars during the day, as it is all washed out by the light scattered around. Similar things happen, although to a lesser extent, on the moon. There is still scattered sunlight.

    So basically – they didn’t take any 5s photos, because the moon and the astronauts would have just been overexposed fuzzy blobs, and the stars wouldn’t appear very nicely either as its very difficult to hold a camera still that long!