Tranquility Base

I have always been open minded about the hoax theories, but unless someone can show these images are fake, it pretty much puts those hoax theories to rest.

Hard to believe it has been 40 years since men walked on the moon. And no other country in the world has done the same thing since. The lonely lunar lander rests in eternal, relative peace only to be disturbed by a meteorite or two and to be covered by some fine moon dust. A tribute to all the scientists and technicians who used feeble computers to put many men on the moon. We left all kinds of crap there including dune buggies. Maybe one day we can bring that ancient stuff back and it would command a nice price on EBay.

And to anyone who says that it’s impossible to keep the many people who’ve worked and continue to work in the space program deceived, then you obviously don’t understand the simplest, most rudimentary concept of how an intelligence agency operates.
Google the word “compartmentalization”, and click on the definition beside the word “intelligence” in parentheses.
Now go have fun finding out what you don’t know, and stop dismissing anyone who questions the “truth” put out by a federal agency, like Nasa, like the Department of Defense, as a “wacko”.
We “wacko’s” might not have all the answers, but at least we’re not swallowing every lure, hook, and rod thrown out to the public.
In my opinion, the real wacko’s are the ones with hooks dangling from their mouths. As if you didn’t know already.

When is the public going to wake up and realize that Nasa has been lying about everything. I’m not saying the moon landings were faked, I couldn’t prove it one way or the other, but what I am saying is…
Work with me here.
Nasa has shown us images of planets orbiting stars light years from Earth, light years…
Nasa has shown us high resolution close ups of comets impacting Jupiter…
Google Earth puts you right on top of my house, see my car in the driveway…
But this grayed out, over exposed image, with little to no discernible detail, is the best image possible of the Apollo Lunar landing site? The site of the single most important event in known human history?
How about this? Let’s put Nasa on trial and say to it, “Prove to a jury of twelve men and women that you did, as you say, land human beings on the Moon and brought them back to Earth”.
Would what they’ve put out so far, in the thirty or so years since the landings meet the stringent burden of proof required to convince a jury of everyday folks, like you and I that they’ve done what they claim?

I never thought the landing was a hoax. EVER, but now that NASA has released these photos, (real or not)(Photoshop is easy people, I’m for the first time in 40 years beginning to wonder that maybe it was a hoax. Why are they releasing these now? The shadow government CIA/FBI.SS, proves it’s cover ups whenever it tries to do its damage control after the fact, ie 9/11, Assasinations of JFK, RFK, MLK, and on and on.

Not that the nonsense even deserves a reply since it’s so comical. One reason the wingnuts can’t be taken seriously is you’re still using lies to prop up the claim. Lets take the lie about the Van Allen belt. This only proves that you don’t know what you’re talking about. The lie works on the ignorant who don’t actually know where the belt ends or how far beyond it the moon lies. The astronauts didn’t hang out in the belt as you pretend. The radiation exposure from passing through the Van Allen belt was no more dangerous than an xray. Of course maybe you’re claiming thousands of more people are involved keeping the “real” data about that secret also.
And pretty much every other piece of nonsense mentioned here comes down to money.
Why a cheap probe to the moon and an expensive one to Mars? It answers itself. $$
Why no Google Earth of the moon? It again answers itself. $$ plus the distance. HiRes imaging satellites are a few hundred km above the earth… the moon is 380,000+ km.
Why haven’t we gone back to the moon? It answers itself. Additional Apollo mission were canceled because we as a country lost interest in funding them.
All of the people insisting the landings never happened fall into 2 categories they’re either making money off of gullibility or throwing their money at them.

I always believed that everything was true and those images I saw on our B&W TV in 69 were actually happening. I still want to believe but I think that NASA, with the technology that is available today, could a much better job proving to the public that it is not a hoax. Another curious thing I just saw on the picture that Armstrong took after walking away from the module, what happened to his footprints? Unless he took a really big jump to get where he took the picture, we should be able to his footprints leading to that spot. Curious….

I have always believed that we did go to the moon but I also think that NASA could do a much better job at convincing the skeptics that it was not a hoax, especially with all the technology that we have available today. One question I do have after looking at the picture of the landing module that Armstrong took from a distance, if he took a “dash” to get there, where are his footprints? Interesting….

WhatDaBlah “For this to be a hoax the Soviets had to be in on it.” Well said.
I think my favorite reality challenged comments are the ones from people who think they’re getting higher quality images of comet impacts on Jupiter. It says some pretty sad things about our educational system when people have such a distorted understanding of the scale of things like this. I doubt we’ll have images of Jupiter in our lifetime as good as the ones above of the moon.
To the… I’m not even sure what to call people claiming the landings didn’t happen… if you really want NASA to “prove it” call your Congressman and get their funding increased. Right now they’re by far one of the most successful government agencies. I’m all for an increase in their budget. It beats flushing it down Iraq and Afghanistan.

Conspiracy theorists would still believe the moon landing was a hoax even if they traveled there and saw the landing site with their own eyes. They would claim the landing site was “staged.”

I am just saying….as a photographer, one cannot really accept photos as proof of anything these days with Photoshop and other programs, it is so easy to fake something. I do not know if Apollo 11 was a hoax. I do know we have had high powered lenses for a very long time and also we have many other trips to the moon since 1969. Why is this the first photo of the site in 40 years? I find it difficult to believe, that is all.

With today’s “tell-all book” mentality, anyone who believes the landing was a hoax is delusional!! — Come on, think about it!! — All of the managers/superiors from 1969 are all dead — so what would stop ANY of the underlings from making a couple of million quick bucks by “coming clean” with the hoax??? — If it was faked, how did we send 5 more landers to the surface without a leak?? — Why would hoaxers “throw-in” the near catastrophy of Appollo 13?? — wouldn’t it have been easier to just make them all “land” perfectly?? — There are too many obstacles to any hoax theories!!

I imagine a few of the conspiracy theorists could argue their own birth was faked. I am in awe of the achievements of NASA and thrilled with the technology we now enjoy because of their science advances. What an amazing image from LRO.

So many gullible people in the world who believe what the government says. Especially you WhatdaBlah, it appears you know little about the Van Allen radiation belt from your comments. Did you also know that NASA sent a probe with a Geiger counter attached in the beginning and that the meter stopped working when it hit the belt, capturing an absolute lethal dose of radiation, completely pegged the meter, indicating that nothing could live passing thru it. Hardly just an x-ray exposure. How do you explain the NASA movies where they supposedly filmed two different locations on separate occasions, but the background in both films is exactly the same, you can even overlay them and see it perfectly? How do you explain no crater under the lunar lander from the rocket blast in what NASA calls fine talcum powder lunar surface, a multi ton rocket blast to boot, but yet I can go in my yard and fire up my leaf blower and push dirt around very easily.
Did you also know that the LRO NASA currently has in orbit has the capabilities to take very high resolution photos, supposedly down to objects of 18 inches in size, but yet we never see any of those. Secondly the LRO orbits the moon at an altitude of 30 miles, but yet no high res photos,
But Google can take pictures of my car in the driveway from an altitude of 423 miles high!!! Ridiculous
There are too many anomalies, challenge your government!! And get the real answers!!

whatajoke – “compare this photo of the m17 omega nebula in all of its stunning beauty and then look at the grainy black and white photo of the moon which by the way is a lot closer to the earth than the above mentioned nebula..”
And the detail and resolution of the moon photo is so many times better it’s hard to even define it. This is the problem with these claims of hoax is that they are so poorly thought out that they don’t need to be refuted… they don’t even need to be considered.

Good grief, reading the stupidity here is laughable – if it weren’t so sad. OK, for one thing, we do NOT have images of worlds outside our solar system. Planets are discovered using stars, light wavelengths being emitted by said stars due to their “wobble” and mathematics. There are no actual images of planets yet. Secondly, people don’t seem to know squat about optics. We don’t have great images of the lunar landing sites for the same reason Hubble can’t see up Putin’s nose, even though its only thosands of miles away – yet it can see billions of miles into space – because Hubble wasn’t designed for seeing things close to earth.

i understand hubble cant take pictures of the moon with the detail we are talking about.. don’t argue the equipment because if a rover can land on mars and take amazing panoramic shots like the one i posted, why couldn’t the same be done on the moon not even to satisfy the naysayers.. but to glorify the scene to americans everywhere. kids could have posters on their walls.. it’s 2009.. i’m sorry but this “proof” or “memento” isn’t enough either way. we are capable of much better i’m sure..

Google earth the moon?
Google earth is not satellite images it is
aireal photos combined on a mosaic.
Google earth photos are from less than 5 miles up. The lunar landing photos are from 30 miles away.

>>don’t argue the equipment because if a rover can land on mars and take amazing panoramic shots like the one i posted, why couldn’t the same be done on the moon not even to satisfy the naysayers<<<
Because IT IS EXPENSIVE AS H3LL, that's why. You can't just use Hibble or an existing telescope or other tech to take a closeup picture of the landing site, so you need to build a system designed to do that. And NASA isn't going to spend $600 million just to prove a (very tiny mnority) of nutbags wrong. And even if NASA did do that, you people wouldn't believe anything they released anyway. So what's the point?

whatajoke – “if a rover can land on mars and take amazing panoramic shots like the one i posted,” Wait wait wait. I just caught that. You posted a photo of a deep space nebula. That wasn’t taken by any Mars rover.
“why couldn’t the same be done on the moon not even to satisfy the naysayers. but to glorify the scene to americans everywhere.”
I couldn’t care less about the naysayers. They can think anything they like and I wouldn’t care even a little. But hey I’m all for major space projects. Call your Congressman and demand that NASA’s budget be increased. They’re one of the few government agencies we can be truly proud of. Sadly far too many people want their budget not only cut but eliminated. This is why enormously expensive extravagances like many here are talking about are absurd. The ‘naysayers’ pretend NASA has some unlimited budget by whining why don’t we ‘just’ go back.

I just don’t understand why so many believe the moon landings were a hoax? It was a matter of throwing tens of billions of dollars at a problem. America just happened to have the money, resolve and brilliant minds to put it all together first. All my schoolmates in FL during the space race had one or both parents working for NASA or an affiliated business. It was a spare no expense project. The EVA suits were perhaps the most complex problem. Everything else was old school technology recycled or blown up to supersize scale. Anyone like me whom has witnessed a Saturn V launch believes.

The pictures really don’t show much. Like someone else said… Google maps shows more than these pictures do. Why is that?

What if we did land on the moon, but a fake landing was also recorded? Consider this possible explanation:
“As is often reported, the early Moon landings involved startled astronauts making statements on live feed about “we were not the first” and the like. Likewise, live video feed showed trash on the Moon giving evidence that activity had occurred in the past, and perhaps the recent past. Evidence of awareness of the alien presence, or other information not given to the general public, can often be discerned from what is not said as much as what is said. Why the 3 month delay in reporting, by different media organizations, if approval to report was not a part of the process? Likewise, the astronauts were on a need-to-know basis, as they were expected to be mobbed if they succeeded and went on the lecture tour, often interviewed and the like, and slips were to be avoided by telling them as little as possible. Thus, they were genuinely startled by what they found on the Moon, and their handlers in Houston were unaware of the degree of evidence they would in fact find on the Moon. Oops! What to do? Lets just film some new footage, and release that, instead.
The astronauts were read the riot act when they returned, having blabbered their first impressions on the Moon. It has been obvious to those looking at the pattern that prior to this live feeds were the norm, and after delayed and only partial release of video and audio was allowed. When a heavy job of intimidation is done, with death threats and worse than death threats, it takes a lot to release this. Beat a dog each hour, viciously, for months, and then try to tell it that was all in the past. The dog has lost trust, cowers, growls, avoids, and will likely never trust humans again most certainly if not in the same company. NASA has not changed hands, is still the same agency, infiltrated by CIA, and thus the astronauts, as their beaten dogs, are loath to trust.”

At the risk of stating the obvious … It is not possible to dissuade the landing deniers for the same reason you can’t argue with a flat-earther, or a creationist, or a believer in ghosts.
Logic does not work because their beliefs are not rationally arrived at. They start with the answer, and work backwards through the data, torturing it where necessary so that the answer can be said to “fit”.
I was once lucky enough to shake hands with James Irwin. Never forget it.

I’m laughing my head off at all the conspiracy theories!!! Thanks guys – you made my day. Your tin-foil hats are in the mail. :-)

Some of these comments are just silly and ridiculous. I was six years old when the Soviets launched their Sputnik satellite, and I saw it with my own eyes because my father called me out into the front yard one night and pointed a flashlight beam at it. I followed all of the initial Mercury launches, flights, splashdowns, followed all of the subsequent Apollo launches, flights, moon landings and splashdowns, and to reduce the entire thing to the level of a big “hoax” filmed in a secretive studio somewhere is absolutely absurd to the point of idiocy. You’d may as well claim that there have never been any Shuttle flights and that the Hubbell Telescope is also a hoax. All of those civilians who have stood watching all of those rockets take off from Cape Canaveral over the years have actually just been fooled by an enormous holographic- projection image developed by the CIA! Get a life.

WhatDaBlah – “Honestly what is wrong with us as a country if we don’t have the most fundamental and basic knowledge. There are literally people in third world countries who would laugh at the questions posted here.”
I think it’s 2 things personally. Laziness and a culture that abhors education. It the same mental laziness that leads people to embrace nonsense like aliens building the pyramids or alien technology being responsible for the microprocessor. People are so far from being science literate that ‘illiterate’ doesn’t even cover it. We may need to start referring to our country as anti-literate. Some people are so incapable of conceiving how even basic things around them work that they view it almost as magic. The US is eager to step down as a world leader in science because few understand it and far too many fear it like ancient humans likely feared fire the first time they saw it. And it’s hard to argue that we deserve to remain where we are. Scientists have to literally fight public animosity to make any step forward.

Most of you people who believe in the Hoax used half bake analogies to prove your point. i.e. pictures of planets orbiting stars light years away or comets hitting a planet. Many of these statements only do one thing, they show the hoax believers ignorance regarding the facts. No planets have been imaged around other stars. Only the effect they exert on those stars has been measured. The reason you can see the comet fragments hitting Jupiter is due to the size of these objects. They are huge. Whereas, the lunar landing site is, by comparison, microscopic. Just because its is closer does not mean it can be seen. If you pointed the hubble space telescope toward the Apollo 11 Landing site it would not be able to image the lander. An object on the Moon 4 meters (4.37 yards) across, viewed from HST, would be about 0.002 arcsec in size. The highest resolution instrument currently on HST is the Advanced Camera for Surveys at 0.03 arcsec. So anything we left on the Moon cannot be resolved in any HST image. It would just appear as a dot. Wake up people.

I really do not care what the Moon Hoaxers believe, because they have nothing better to do than to claim the landings were a hoax when it is known throughout the world then and now that the landings were real. Why spend so much money for a rocket that can go to the moon and then don’t go there? Please!
Those who believe the landings were a hoax just do not have an education to know the science behind why certain things are the way they are.

Teeb… You can easily find the answers online if you search for them. This site I found by searching for ‘Moon Hoax Stars’ provided the answer to your question.

What a bunch of idiots to believe it was a hoax… for every single “fact” they claim to be a hoax, there is an actual explanation, with physical, logical and coherent to the laws of physics… america is dwindling with so many idiots

Even though I get frustrated with them I truly feel sorry for the people who are science challenged. I can’t imagine how frightening it must be to walk around in a world that you lack understanding of in so many ways. it’s clear they get brief glimpses of the products of science but that just makes it worse.
They can’t understand it so they lash out asking things like ‘why does this picture look fuzzy but this other doesn’t’ or ‘why doesn’t this picture look like the ones I take with my own camera’.
And then the answers to their questions make the situation still worse because they don’t have the skill set to understand the answer. So they again lash out claiming it’s all fake.

MyNameIs… You’re entitle to your views, but it’s rude to call people ‘tools’ just because they firmly believe we did landed on the moon. Not everyone believe *everything* the government says or do (I certainly do not), but in case of the moon landings, they did happen. Recommend to go back to read some of the posts already mentioned the reasons why cameras can’t take the photos you’ve mentioned.

The image has a vertical noise pattern like I have seen before in monochrome digital image sensors, though a strange size. After cleaning it, the pic looks finer. Makes me wonder if they forgot to calibrate those sensors, and why they didn’t clean the noise before presenting to the public.

OK I didn’t work for NASA or the CIA or the FBI or well any government agent but I DID FIND OUT THE REAL TRUTH! Let me ask you’ll a question here. What if it was a hoax but not like everyone thinks. I propose that the Moon itself is fake along with the Earth and everyone on it. It’s all an elaborate scheme to make me think there are others around who are equal to me and that’s just not true. I know I’m all alone and you’ll don’t exist now buzz off and leave me alone.

Go get bent! I watched with awe as we reached for space! The Apollo program was the apex! SkayLab was the future! I watched ENTERPRISE land from the release of the 747 at Edwards! Voyager! Any person who thinks “The Government faked it”, probably doesn’t vote, belives that 9-11 was a hoax, and that December 7, 1941, was agression AGAINST the Japaneese Empire! Sorry… You lose!