Last week Fox ran a science-challenged “documentary” claiming that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration faked the 1968 moon landing. The claims were so absurd that no rational person with an understanding of physics would buy their arguments.
But then somebody I thought knew better linked to this site which offers a video purporting to prove that NASA faked the moon landing. Ugh.
Anyway, just one example of how tenuous the conspiracy folks hold on physical reality is. The site contains an article by James Collier (famous in conspiracy circles for his Votescam book which claim all U.S. elections are rigged by a power elite) outlining what he thinks is the best evidence against the moonshot. Specifically,
Earth’s atmosphere takes light and bends it, spreading it around objects. Light reflects off air molecules and lights up the dark sides of objects. It is atmosphere, bending the sun’s light, that makes the sky appear to be blue. However, on the moon there is no prism of atmosphere to diffuse or bend light so the sky is totally black.
On the moon, the sun’s light should be blinding. In fact, the astronauts wear gold tinted face plates on their helmets to cut down 95-percent of the light from the sun.
The dark side of objects in NASA photos should be pitch black, while the lit side should be hellishly bright. Yet, all NASA photos from the moon are softly lit, and they appear to be taken in Earth’s atmosphere.
There are a number of “there’s too much light in those photographs” arguments which all ignore the most salient point — the Sun is not the Moon’s only source of light.
Specifically the Earth is a major source of light. In fact the light. On the moon the light given off by the Earth is about 100 times brighter than the amount of light we see from a full moon. Add to that the light bouncing around the lunar surface itself, and the apparent diffusion and lack of totally dark shadows is hardly any great mystery.