Neat Animation of Moon’s North Pole with LASER Altimetry – And Artifacts

I’ll be attending a µSymposium before the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference this coming weekend, and I just got a reminder e-mail today. Included in that e-mail was a link to an animation that shows Shackleton crater, a crater that is ON the moon’s north pole. As such, its interior is in permanent shadow.

BUT!! The Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter instrument (LOLA) on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has plenty of data that allow it to be viewed: Click Me!.

I find this very neat — until the last decade, we could never see stuff in permanent shadow because we didn’t have the instrumentation. LOLA and LROC have allowed us to do that. And there are thousands of craters in permanent shadow on the moon that may hide water (which is what I’ll be presenting at the µSymposium).

For reference, the north pole of the moon is just about smack dab at the 10:30 position on the large crater’s rim. Just inside the rim, along a line from that small crater just outside the rim to the center of the crater.

But for pseudoscience, you may also notice that there are some artifacts in the data. There are radial streaks from the center of the frame (usually). There’s a prominent one diagonally from upper right to lower left on the upper wall of Shackleton itself. Others are more prominent towards the edges of the animation.

These are not lunar roads nor subways nor trollies nor anything else made by an ancient civilization. They are artifacts in the data itself. LOLA is very well calibrated, and the “average” (root-mean-square) uncertainty is under 5 meters in elevation data. But some tracks (orbits) are a bit off. And since LOLA is fundamentally measuring the time it takes light to bounce off the surface from a laser beam from the craft, it needs to know exactly where the craft was to get an accurate surface elevation.

And some are off by a bit. These manifest in this kind of product as ridges or troughs that are perfectly in a straight line, along the line of the orbital track. It’s something that scientists who use these data see and ignore because we know exactly what they are. But pseudoscientists will look at line artifacts like this, or at image seems in a mosaic, and claim things like they are artificial tram lines.

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“Created by Adobe Photoshop” Doesn’t Mean That The Image Is Fake

Introduction

I’m dredging this up from the archives. It was my fourth Swift post, published I think near the beginning of January. I’m so busy with stuff and trying to keep track of various projects that I neglected to share it here.

The Post

This post is about a small, technical tool that should be in everyone’s skeptical toolkit. It finds its place in a wide variety of claims that have almost anything to do with images as the source of that claim.

For example, back in the day, proponents of the Apollo “Moon Hoax” had a lot of different claims they could make. They were wrong, but they could still make them. One of the three or four predominant claims made was, “Why hasn’t NASA (or another space agency) taken any photos of the landing sites?” The explanation gets to the limits of physics and optics – something a first-year physics student (or even high school student) could explain, but one that defied most hoax proponents.

Unfortunately for the hoax proponents, the claim had a limited lifespan. In 2009, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter had a camera that could take those long-awaited photos: the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC), specifically the Narrow-Angle Camera (NAC). This camera, from the distance above the moon that the spacecraft orbited, has taken photos with pixel scales anywhere from 25 cm to 100 cm (about 10″ to 40″). This is more than enough to see the Apollo landers, and it’s done so many times (go to this page, then scroll down to “Apollo Landing Sites,” and click on any of the drop-down links to see the amazing photos).

The question amongst us astronomically minded skeptics was, “How will the hoax proponents respond?” We didn’t have long to wait: “They’re Photoshopped!” (such as this website, and the embedded YouTube video). And, to a casual observer, the hoax proponents seemed to maybe have a point. After all, if one were to examine the metadata of the images of the landing sites posted online, it said that they were created in Photoshop.

This claim is repeated all over the internet with claims of faking other images, and the generic form is this: “If you look at the metadata for the image, it says that it was created or modified in [insert image processing software name] and therefore that is PROOF POSITIVE that the image has been faked.”

People who make that claim are wrong.

So then, what is metadata? Back in the pre-digital era, photographers kept log books that carefully documented all of their settings, like shutter speed or aperture. Metadata is the digital equivalent of this, and it is usually stored inside of the image file (commonly JPG) itself. When I take a photograph with my camera and then look at the metadata, the metadata will tell me the camera type and model, the firmware version, the shutter speed, f-stop, ISO, any mode I had the camera on, any color adjustment, and lots of other information. If you’ve ever geotagged a photo, that’s also put into the metadata.

Many computer-based photo storage solutions like Apple’s iPhoto will write metadata into the image file itself when you tag images with keywords or faces.

So, metadata is the digital equivalent of a logbook, and it is created automatically and stored within the image itself. It’s very useful. It’s not a bad thing, and for a guy like me who documents stuff like crazy, it’s a good way to keep track of things.

But, metadata doesn’t just happen in the camera or in digital photo storage software. It will also be written by most software that does anything with photos, such as Adobe’s Photoshop software. After all, from a marketing standpoint, it, too, wants to let anyone looking at the metadata know that that software had some role in the image you’re looking at.

That role could be as simple as saving a photo as a different file format. I’ve often taken image files that were saved in one file format by graphing software I use, opened them in Photoshop, and saved the graph as a different file format. I did absolutely no manipulation to the image in Photoshop, but Photoshop will still write into the metadata that I have done something to that image in Photoshop; it will even include the version of Photoshop that I used.

Or, I have panorama-stitching software that will also write out metadata stating that it created the image, which I then take into Photoshop and may adjust the brightness and Photoshop will again overwrite that panorama software’s tag with its own.

That’s my photography, and some of my work images for publication.

Similarly, I have taken spacecraft images, and not liking the more common tools that many in my field use to create a mosaic, I will do it in Photoshop. That means taking perfectly good, normal images, placing them carefully relative to each other, and then saving the final mosaic as a single file.

That doesn’t mean I faked it. That doesn’t mean I manipulated it beyond just stitching the mosaic together. That doesn’t mean I brushed over some alien who was waving a spotlight at me, nor does it mean I drew in a lander and astronaut foot trails over what had been smooth terrain. All it means is that Photoshop happened to be the last piece of software that saved the image.

It’s incredibly benign. It’s something that most of us do every day without paying it a second thought. It’s something that millions of copies of image software do every day without people knowing. And because of this, if a conspiracy-minded person feels like it, they can look at the image file’s metadata, pull out the line that says “Adobe Photoshop,” and then to most people it will seem to cast doubt on the image.

It takes just a few seconds to claim it’s a conspiracy, but I’ve now spent a few hundred words explaining why it’s not. You may not run across this claim often, but when you do, you’ll be better able to understand why it’s not a vast conspiracy.

Kaguya (SELENE / かぐや) Photographs of the Moon, Specifically the Claimed Ziggurat Area

Introduction

After this point, Mike needs to answer the basic question of: What would it take to falsify your claim?

It’s a basic question that every person should always ask of anything, including their own beliefs. I’ve explained several times what it would take to falsify my claims that Mike’s ziggurat claim is false. Each time Mike has posted something new about it, he has generally ignored my previous rebuttal as “silly” or “twaddle” or some other such thing, either outright stating (at least once) or implying (several times) that my analysis would be easy to show was wrong, and yet he has not done so.

The Parry This Time

…[H]e’s implying that there are images from “non-NASA” missions which don’t showthe [sic] Ziggurat on them, and further, that he has seen them. How else could he claim they “don’t show the feature” if he hasn’t seen them? If true and these images exist, then he should produce them. The burden of proof is not on me to produce them, it’s on him. He’s the one claiming they exist, not me.

…If there are such “non-NASA” images, then produce them, otherwise shut-up about them and admit you BS’d your readers into thinnking [sic] they ever existed in the first place.

On a small part of this, I would actually agree: I did make the claim that there are non-NASA images that cover the site, and so the burden of evidence is upon me to show that.

In fact, it was the second of my main three points as to why I think that the ziggurat is not real: “2. Why other images of the same place taken by several different craft (including non-NASA ones), including images at almost 100x the original resolution of the Apollo photo, don’t show the feature.”

Though, clearly, I was NOT necessarily saying that non-NASA craft had imaged it at 100x the original Apollo.

Of course, Mike misses the point that it is up to him to prove the INITIAL claim that the ziggurat is real when he found it on a video game forum.

Kaguya / SELENE / かぐや

Kaguya was the nickname of the Selenological and Enginering Explorer (SELENE) spacecraft to the Moon, built and launched and operated by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) that flew for several years, 2007-2009. It had several cameras on it, and it was the first to image the Apollo landing sites and actually show something from the missions due to its high resolution of up to 10 meters per pixel (actual pixel scale depended on orbit and instrument).

Using their online data search and retrieval system, you can (and I did) search for and find several images that cover the site. Among them are the following. Note: JAXA is picky, and you MUST go to their main page, agree to their terms, click Start and then you can view the links below.

• MNA_2B2_01_03695S091E1741 @ 60mpp – thumbnail || data page
• MVA_2B2_01_03695S091E1741 @ 20mpp – thumbnail || data page
• SP_2B2_01_01192_S091_E1746 @ (not stated) – thumbnail || data page
• SP_2B2_01_03695_S088_E1741 @ (not stated) – thumbnail || data page
• DTMTCO_03_05874S092E1744SC @ 10mpp – thumbnail || data page
• DTMTCO_03_01192S091E1746SC @ 10mpp – thumbnail || data page

To remind you, the Apollo photo has a pixel scale of ROUGHLY 65 meters per pixel at that location.

Example Image

I’ve downloaded those six and contained within the obtuse file format (see this link for dealing with it) is the JPG thumbnail. Within the two files at 10 mpp, you have the IMG file that can be read with ISIS.

Here’s one of them, full-res of the target region (again, reason for the wavy edges is the geometric correction I’ve talked about many times before). Make sure you click to enlarge.

DTMTCO_03_05874S092E1744SC with “Ziggurat” Area at Full-Resolution (click to enlarge)

That’s at nearly 7x the pixel scale of the Apollo photo.

In my post from early yesterday morning, I gave you the following context image of NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera’s WAC and NAC:

WAC and NAC of Alleged Lunar Ziggurat (click to enlarge)

So you know where the ziggurat is. Now we can also compare the WAC with the Kaguya image:

Alleged Ziggurat Area – WAC and Kaguya Comparison

The sun angles are all somewhat different, though I gave you several other images at other sun angles from SELENE above.

Where Do We Go Now?

I’ve put many of my cards on the table. I think I’ve shown pretty well my points.

But at the same time, we have not progressed anywhere. Mike has not directly responded to any of my direct, specific points, critiques, areas where I explained that he was incorrect about some fundamental points of image processing and analysis (such as with noise), nor refutations/answers to his questions/conspiracies (such as the last one about the “Venetian Blinds” effect of all WAC images). He’s continued to maintain the NASA images are fake, and then insisted that I supply those from other agencies. I think it’d be hard to say that JAXA is under NASA control, or that JAXA painted the ziggurat area black, though I’m sure he’ll probably claim something like they cloned it out of the JAXA image. Hard to back that up considering that, as far as is possible to tell, it matches the other images of the site, along with the other images from Kaguya.

At this point, though, we’re really again at the question of: What does it take to falsify your beliefs? We can’t move forward if the answer is “nothing,” nor if the response to these SELENE photos is simply that it’s another part of the conspiracy.

I understand that Mike feels the need to defend this considering that he’s put so much effort into it and made it a centerpiece of his book due out in October. But seriously – again – I think that to any objective observer I’ve proven my point and Mike has failed to prove his.

Understanding Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Wide-Angle Camera Images

Introduction

In an update to Mike’s blog post from yesterday, Mike displays further lack of reading comprehension plus an inability to understand images and image processing — something that he claims to be better at than I.

Another Conspiracy Claim

The crux of Mike’s bone this time is that the WAC image I linked to has a “Venetian Blinds” effect going on. Why?

Well, Mike says he’s an engineer, so one would think that he would know of the ways to look into this. I’ll help those of you who don’t have Mike’s expertise that he did not exercise: The camera employs 7 filters, and they act like a grating, spreading the light out across the detector. It’s just how the image was recorded. I happen to use command-line software to reconstruct the images, and it can be fairly obtuse. But, 10 seconds of Google searching shows that there’s apparently easy-to-use freeware software out there to do this all by yourself.

If you’d like to read more about it, here’s the official journal paper outlining the craft and its instruments. If you do a google scholar search, then you can find a free PDF copy of it. Here’s a paper specifically on the camera, but I don’t see an obvious link for a free copy.

To quote from the 2007 paper:

The seven-band color capability of the WAC is provided by a color filter array mounted directly over the detector, providing different sections of the CCD with different filters acquiring data in the seven channels in a “pushframe” mode. Continuous coverage in any one color is provided by repeated imaging at a rate such that each of the narrow framelets of each color band overlap.

Every WAC image looks like that coming raw from the LROC website, though I also gave you a link to the global mosaics where you can look at the region yourself, on your own, without needing to assemble the WAC. Again, the coordinates are 174.34°E, -8.97°N.

So to recap: That’s how the WACs look, and it’s a simple matter to process them into a human-happy image. This has been in the literature at least since 2007, and if Mike bothered to look, he’d have seen that EVERY WAC image looks that way and requires reassembly. Why don’t they do that automatically for public consumption? I have no idea. Possibly because if revised algorithms come out to do an incrementally better job, they wouldn’t have to reprocess everything. Same reason the NACs are not properly georectified.

Contrast that with Mike’s conspiratorial ideas:

Hmm. I guess maybe the guys at NASA don’t want anybody sniffing around this area, do they? This is just more proof that you can’t trust digital images NASA produces. They must have posted this temporarily while they’re busy painting over the Ziggurat.

So the truth is, neither of the images he’s posted show anything like what he’s claiming, and they sure as hell don’t show the Ziggurat area in sufficient resolution to make a judgement about it.

Do you know what “truth” means? I mean, really? Another conspiracy? Pretty poor one considering that anyone who looks can easily figure out how to assemble the WACs. And anyone who looks can find out why they look that way.

Another Look at the LROC Images

Here, I’ll do more of your work for you. Here’s a screenshot of part of the NAC frame, from the link I gave before, that covers part of the area you claim the ziggurat to cover. I’ve even superposed part of the footprint of your ziggurat over the image, and this is far from full-res. (Note, this is a bit different from the footprint I showed towards the end of the video; I was a bit off then and a reexamination has led me to revise the approximate footprint. Figuring out exactly what’s going on between the oblique Apollo image and the rectified WAC/NAC images is a tad hard.)

NAC of Alleged Ziggurat Area, Approximate Ziggurat Footprint in Green (click to enlarge)

The footprint above is obviously unconstrained off the left side of the NAC. But, here’s a family portrait where I think I have it better figured out:

WAC and NAC of Alleged Lunar Ziggurat (Notice, None Present) (click to enlarge)

Let’s see, what else can I think of with what I’m showing that might give Mike a conspiratorial claim … okay, a few potential trivial things that could set the conspiracy-minded off:

• The WAC has wavy borders for reasons I discussed in my last podcast episode — basically, it’s a topography and spacecraft pointing correction.
• The ziggurat footprint is a weird shape because the original Apollo shot is very much oblique (a perspective) and when rectified to a lat/lon gird as if you’re looking down on it, it is elongated and not square — you can increase the height (and rotate by 180°) the Bara/Hoagland image by ~5x to get an idea of what it would look like.
• North/South are flipped if you look at the images on the LROC website — again, that’s just how they’re sent back to Earth and automatically set up for the web interface, nothing conspiratorial as it’s clearly documented for anyone who looks.
• On the ACT-REACT map that I linked to above, if you turn on NAC footprints, there does not appear to be one that covers the region occupied by the claimed ziggurat. This is because they are using an earlier set of footprints (this is a recent NAC), but if you use the search for the coordinates elsewhere on the site, you’ll find this one.
• There are deep shadows because the sun was only 15° above the horizon when the image was taken. Since I have no idea why that image was taken (I’m not on the science/imaging team), I can’t guess as to why it was taken at that sun angle, but it’s entirely possible that it just happened to be a region not covered yet by NAC and they had a spare moment with the camera. But that lit part in the center of the NAC that I show is the left half of the claimed ziggurat (remember it’s rotated 180° in Mike’s version, so North is pointing down in his).

Final Thoughts … For Now

That’s about all I can think of, though I’m certain that Mike will find something else or just claim I’m lying and these images don’t show what I claim them to show or that I’ve now shown that the images he claimed were mythical now have two members but I need to find others. I guess we’ll see.

Oh, and it might be worth recapping at this point: This was never originally about Mike Bara. This was about a claim made by Richard Hoagland about an image he had that I then did a short analysis on and showed was likely hoaxed by someone. It’s turned into something with Mike because he has chosen to vehemently defend it, though his defense has been made of name-calling and conspiracies.

Playing Hide-and-Seek with the Apollo Landers

Introduction

This post is less about “pseudoastronomy” and more about what you (or anyone) with an internet connection can do with the amazing pictures taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Though I suppose it’s also related to the Apollo Moon hoax in that we finally have a camera in orbit that’s capable of seeing the Apollo landers.

The Instrument

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft has been in orbit of the moon for nearly three years. It has a suite of instruments onboard, though the one we want for this exercise is called the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC). This camera actually has two “lenses” on it — a wide-angle camera (WAC) and a narrow-angle camera (NAC).

The spacecraft is in an orbit that, with the field of view of the cameras, allows WAC images to have a pixel scale of 100 meters, and the NAC has a pixel scale of about 50 cm (0.5 meters, or about 20 inches). And that’s just cool.

So we’re using LRO’s LROC’s NAC. Lots of a.c.r.o.n.y.m.s. Each NAC image is about 2.5 km wide and generally about 50 km long – a tiny fraction of the surface of the moon.

What to Do

You could use the LROC image search feature and find the Apollo landing coordinates from Wikipedia or some other source, put them into the search, and go searching for the Apollo sites that way.

You could cheat a bit and use this website’s list of NAC images with the Apollo landing sites in them (that’s what I did). Then you can use the LROC image search and search for that exact image and click on it. Or, you can directly go to the URL http://wms.lroc.asu.edu/lroc/view_lroc/LRO-L-LROC-2-EDR-V1.0/M113853974RE and replace that last string of letters and numbers (M113853974RE in the case here, which is for the Apollo 16 landing site) with the image ID.

Then, search! You can use the Flash-based tool that the LROC team has set up on that page to zoom in and out and search for the landing site, or you can download a TIFF image (generally around 20-50 MB) from the link towards the top (“Download CDR PTIF”). Sometimes using the information and image on the site with the list helps you to find it more easily.

But while you’re searching, you’ll find a lot of other interesting features. You could find the Apollo 17 “Challenger” descent stage along with the astronaut tracks (story about that on the LROC site here). And if you end up liking treasure-hunting on the moon, you may find Moon Zoo a citizen science project, of interest.

When identifying the NAC images to look through, one thing to pay attention to is the “incidence angle” or “solar altitude” which tells you what the shadows are going to be like. You may think that it’s best to see these when the sun is directly overhead (solar altitude is 90°, or incidence angle is 0°). But, this isn’t actually the case, You want longer shadows so that the features are easier to see. Incidence angles closer to 60-80° or so are generally best (solar altitude 10-30°).

But don’t take my word for it — try looking at the same landing site under an 80° incidence versus a 10° incidence angle. While the craters are much harder to see and the landing sites look more like brightness features rather than “3-D” because of the lack of shadows, you’ll see things like bright crater ejecta and dark crater ejecta that the lower sun angles made invisible!

Final Thoughts

Maybe it’s just me, but I actually find this kind of thing fun (I spent an hour looking for Apollo 15 last night in 5 different lighting conditions). It also gives you a nice perspective on the relative sizes of things — not necessarily that the Apollo hardware was “small,” but really how BIG the moon is, and how much we have left to explore.

If the solar system were reduced in size such that the sun were a grapefruit (about 10 cm), Earth would be located about 11 meters away. Humans have traveled a mere 2.8 cm, or about 1 inch, into the solar system.

I also find it absolutely amazing that in this day and age, there are still people out there who don’t think we ever landed people on the moon.

P.S. Please remember my comments policy. I consider anything related to UFOs to be off-topic for this post.

The Apollo Moon Hoax: Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Images Apollo Landing Sites

Introduction

In my post on “The Apollo Moon Hoax: Why Haven’t Any Pictures Been Taken of the Landing Sites?” I mentioned that NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) is scheduled to take photographs of the Apollo landing sites. They did.

All posts in this series:

• The Apollo Moon Hoax: An Overview
• The Apollo Moon Hoax: Why Haven’t Any Pictures Been Taken of the Landing Sites?
• The Apollo Moon Hoax: There Is a “Prop Rock” Labeled with a “C” (Updated)
• The Apollo Moon Hoax: Huge, Deadly Temperature Variation Claims
• The Apollo Moon Hoax: “No Stars” Claim and an Explanation of Dynamic Range
• The Apollo Moon Hoax: How Could the Astronauts Take So Many Photographs?
• The Apollo Moon Hoax: Why Is There No Blast Crater Under the Lunar Module?
• The Apollo Moon Hoax: Why Is There No Lunar Dust on the Lander’s Footpads?
• The Apollo Moon Hoax: Footprints Need Water to Form, Right? And How Hoaxers Argue
• The Apollo Moon Hoax: All the Photos Are Way Too Good!
• The Apollo Moon Hoax: What’s Up with All Those Crosshairs? – Disappearing, Not Centered, and Tilted
• The Apollo Moon Hoax: Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Images Apollo Landing Sites
• The Apollo Moon Hoax: Two Interviews (of Me)

The Photos

These are really fairly unprocessed photographs and they are not at the highest resolution that they will eventually be once LRO actually targets the sites for close-up imaging during its primary mission phase (the narrow-angle camera should be able to resolve sizes of ~0.5 m (1.5 ft)).

However, they are still pretty darn cool, and they fly in the face of people like Bart Sibrel who in this CNN.com article is quoted as saying: “I do know the moon landings were faked,” said crusading filmmaker Bart Sibrel, whose aggressive interview tactics once provoked Aldrin to punch him in the face. “I’d bet my life on it.” Well, Bart, what do you think of these?

Apollo 11 Landing Site

Apollo 15 Landing Site

Apollo 16 Landing Site

Apollo 17 Landing Site

Apollo 14 Landing Site

I think that it’s so cool that you can actually see the astronaut’s footprints (well, the trail of footprints) on the moon. Amazing. (The visible trail is due to the astronauts disturbing the material on the lunar surface, much like we can see the rover trails on Mars from orbit.)

Final Thoughts – The Likely Hoax Response

As I said before, most of the Apollo moon hoax proponents will likely see it as a publicity stunt, that NASA faked ’em, used Photoshop, or whatever. I doubt this will turn a true believer in the conspiracy theory into someone who now believes the official story.

But, for those of us who do know that we actually did land on the moon 40 years ago, these photographs are a welcome reminder of the amazing achievements of the Apollo space program, and they may serve to inspire a new generation of scientists.