Originally Answered: Do you believe the moon landing pictures to be real or fake?
To this day - you can ask to see which rock Harrison Schmidt (say) picked up at such and such a time on such and such a day in such and such a location on the Moon during the Apollo 17 mission.
Such as this rock, a very famous one picked up by Harrison Schmidt and repeatedly re-examined ever since:
Troctolite 76535
Studied for instance in this 2009 paper examining isotope ratios and giving new results about the moon
sciencemag.org
Early Lunar Magnetism Do you think they somehow faked the Argon isotope measurements to match expectations of scientists who would study the rock nearly 50 years later, to test new ideas about the Moon 50 years later on - and still continue to stimulate new research and discoveries 50 years later?
And then when researchers look at the rocks closely, with electron microscopes, they find miniature spherules and tiny craters even at the sub microscopic level.
This is a scanning electron microscope image of a 6 mm spherule from the Moon rocks.
The Great Moon Hoax
You can do that for any of the astronauts and any of the missions.
And watch them set up those laser reflectors on the Moon which to this day are used for ultra precise measurements of the distance of the Moon from the Earth (the only Apollo experiment still running on the Moon).
It just goes beyond belief that all that could be faked and staged - and that the fake is so good that it lead to new and unexpected scientific results, with rocks that continue to tell us new things decades later, examining them with instruments that weren't even invented in those days - still matching what you'd expect from the locations where they were picked up on the Moon.
That would be just impossible to fake. They didn't even know that those instruments would be invented to look at the rocks decades later and didn't know what the scientific theories were that they would be used to test.
So - that was before they managed to do the photographs from low flying orbiters over the Moon. You can now go and look at those photographs - and follow the tracks the astronauts left on the Moon - again in just the right places to match the Apollo missions as described historically.
Here for instance are the recent orbiter images of the Apollo 17 landing site - the last and most interesting mission to the Moon - you can follow the tracks that the astronauts made as they did the field expedition - on the photograph.
Plus - nowadays with photoshop, and far more sophisticated tools, is easy to project back and suppose it could be faked. But back then we didn't have that technology. Look at some of the old movies from those days - multi million dollar movies - and see what they did - even from decades later - even nowadays when people try to do space movies, as in Gravity - they often get many things wrong.
Take a look at the Moon segment of 2001 a Space Odyssey
It was astonishing stuff for its time. We didn't know any better - at the time this film was released, in 1968, nobody had ever seen a video of an astronaut on the Moon. This looked authentic to its first viewers. And long before CGI etc, this sort of shot was expensive to do! But do you think this technology was sufficient to fake Apollo?
(This was released in 1968, the year before Apollo and was 5 years in the making - if NASA had a secret 5 year program to fake Apollo, this is the level of technological accomplishment you'd expect from their film).
And don't try to tell me that the US government was about 30 or 40 years ahead of their time with secret technology including computer chips and such like that it took decades of work and huge teams of people and factories to invent and create elsewhere - that's even more beyond belief.
They wouldn't need to prove themselves with a space race in that case. Could have done many other utterly astonishing and mind blowing things for people of their time.
And of course if there was anything at all faked, even some tiny detail, the Russians would have been all over it and it would have been big news at the time.
And - the conspiracy advocates for the Moon landings - they just say all sorts of basic things that anyone even with an amateur interest in the subject can see to be nonsense. Such as for instance the things about the dark sky in the lunar photos having no stars in it - of course it wouldn't with the bright sunlit lunar surface. That they even say that immediately destroys their credibility as having any kind of expertise in the subject - as far as I am concerned, if you make an elementary mistake like that, how do you expect anything you say to be believed?
With the cameras they had then, no way could they have an exposure setting that lets them see both the stars and the bright lunar surface in the same photograph. Except the very brightest objects - not stars, they are too faint - even Sirius I'd have thought - but I believe one of the photographs shows Venus - that is possible.
Yes here we go
Loads of other silly things like that in the conspiracy websites. Just go through and see one silly thing after another. E.g. the waving flag - everyone knew about that at the time - that NASA had to go to a lot of trouble to get a flag that would seem to be flying on the Moon.
I don't know about other conspiracies. I tend to suspect that most, if not all of them are like this. But in this one, where I have a reasonable level of expertise - just ordinary astronomical background kind of expertise, I don't have the slightest doubt, it's an absurd claim.
See also all the answers to Did Neil Armstrong really land on the moon? Lot's of good stuff there.
I added an answer there as well:
Robert Walker's answer to Apollo 11: 1969 Moon Landing: Did Neil Armstrong really land on the Moon?
And see The Great Moon Hoax
About the Author
Robert Walker
Writer of articles on Mars and Space issues - Software Developer of Tune Smithy, Bounce Metronome etc.Studied at Wolfson College, Oxford
Lives in Isle of Mull
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