Podcast Episode 163: Modern Eclipse Lunacy, Part 1

Solar Eclipses:
Even in the modern day,
Lunacy exists.

Back and pumping out a 42-minute episode on some of the crazy surrounding the recent lunar eclipse, crazy that you’re not going to hear from other sources. This past eclipse on August 21, 2017, was perhaps one of the most-hyped and most-viewed solar eclipses in human history. As with any such mass-sighted event, pseudoscience is bound to rear its ugly head. In this episode, I address doom and gloom, earthquake predictions, astrologic predictions, Planet X predictions, and other topics related to the eclipse.

There’s one additional segment, and that’s about where I’ve been (literally).

Solar Eclipse from August 21, 2017 (©Stuart Robbins)

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A Piece of Lint Becomes a 10-Mile High Tower on the Moon

Introduction

I subscribe to Expat’s “Dork Mission” blog in my RSS reader, and so I’m privy to people other than Richard Hoagland that he has made an hobby of watching and looking for perversions of rationality. One such set of claims is by a self-titled “civilian intelligence analyst,” Robert Morningstar.

Robert Morningstar (or M* as he occasionally signs things and I’ll use for short) was on Richard Hoagland’s radio program on September 3, and on the program he discussed many things, but there was one in particular that I’d seen Expat discuss before, but I’d never really investigated myself.

The claim is so bizarre that I wanted to share it with you.

The Claim: Big Ben on the Moon

Robert has made this claim for at least a year, that he has found what he terms “Big Ben” (named for the famous London landmark), but on the Moon. He found this while analyzing lunar photographs. The object is 10 miles high, according to his analysis.

It was only when I heard how he did his analysis and I looked at the photos he presents, myself, that I decided this blog post was worth it.

The Photo

First off, it’s difficult to know what photographs he used in terms of catalog numbers. Robert, like many in his field of anomaly hunting, does not provide documentation to allow independent analysis, rather he only presents the image in and of itself. This also means I can’t go find other versions of it that might be earlier generations, nor can I find the highest quality nor resolution.

Based on the fiducials (crosshairs) faintly visible in the photograph, I think this was Apollo. From searching through Expat’s blog, I found I was correct, it’s Apollo image AS17-M-2366.

To wit, here is the photograph that he claims hosts “Big Ben,” which I got at higher resolution than from Richard Hoagland’s site from another site where M* was interviewed:

AS17-M-2366 Early Scan (click to embiggen)

If you don’t see much, that’s not surprising. What Robert is calling “Big Ben” is a small apparent bright protrusion from the upper-left of the moon’s limb. Here is the enlargement that he provided to Richard:

“Big Ben on the Moon” According to Robert Morningstar (click to embiggen)

He Analyzed a Photograph of His Computer Screen

Let that heading sink in a moment. What Robert did, as he stated on-air, and is evident from the obvious slightly rotated-from-vertical pixels in the second image, is he took the first photo (likely higher resolution than I have, but again I don’t know what the photo is so I can’t look), he likely enlarged it on his computer screen (if he didn’t, that doesn’t matter for this analysis), and he then took a digital camera and took a photograph of his computer screen.

It’s from that photograph of his computer screen that he then did any and all subsequent analysis.

This is one of those cases where I’m literally at a loss for words. It’s almost a situation of Not Even Wrong. To put it as succinctly and briefly as I can, he has introduced a substantial amount of completely unnecessary artifacts into the image that the idea that he thinks this is a proper way to analyze an image makes me question every single other claim he might ever make in the future.

Put another way, he has somewhat close-ish to original “pixels” in the original image (again, this is a somewhat early scan of an early copy of an Apollo photograph). Why would you then go and take a picture of your computer screen and analyze that picture?!

Lint

Beyond the ridiculousness of analyzing a photo of his computer screen that was showing a digital image, there is a big red flag that indicates this is simply a bit of contamination (lint, dust, etc.) on the scanner that was used to scan the print: Just under 600 pixels away, there is a very obvious piece of lint on the print, a bright bit that’s 1-pixel-wide that has a slight bend at the end:

Lint in AS17-M-2366 (click to embiggen)

Lint. Just like “Big Ben.”

And, as others on Expat’s blog have pointed out, in the next frame of that sequence of photographs (AS17-M-2367), from that scan generation, the approximate same pattern of lint has moved off the limb of the moon by what would be ~1000 km:

Moving Lint

And, in classic pseudoscientific fashion, M* does not look for other scans of the same photograph and show us that the feature is still there, nor does he present us with any images from a half dozen other spacecraft that have photographed the entire moon since Apollo and shown us that the feature is still present.

In fact, towards the former point, Arizona State University is in the process of scanning all the Apollo photographs at much higher resolution than had been done years ago by the Lunar & Planetary Institute (LPI). Here’s the link to AS17-M-2366 where you can download a 1.2 GB version of the image, or you can browse a 660 KB or 11 MB version.

You’ll note that, if you take a look, those pieces of lint are gone. Now I suspect that if confronted by this, Robert would just say that it’s been removed by The Powers that Be to hide it and give fodder to debunkers like me.

Final Thoughts

Here’s the problem: If your only evidence is one version of one photograph, and no other version of that photograph, the next photograph in the series that shows almost the exact same area, nor any other photograph of that area shows the feature, chances are your first photograph is the one that’s wrong, not every other one.

Given that, and given the above, here’s another reason why I don’t have a problem classifying M* as a pseudoscientist. This is a quote from him when he was on a radio program discussing “Big Ben:”

Now these debunkers, they claim that that’s dust on the film, or an anomaly in the emulsion. Again, I’m just showing you a picture that was taken by Apollo 17 — a picture that’s been in the archives for 42 years and I just happen to be the one that found it and recognized it, so I show it to you. And what do you think that looks like? I told you what I think it looks like, so I named it that. I named it “Big Ben on the Moon.”

In that, he completely avoids the content of the criticisms of his claim, and he goes even one more step backwards: He seems unable to even consider that it might not be on the original image: “a picture that’s been in the archives for 42 years.”

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and a feature that looks like lint, only found in one version of one photograph, that looks like lint in other areas of the photograph, and compounded with “analysis” of that feature on a photograph of that image being displayed on a computer screen, does not extraordinary evidence make.

Most Craters Look the Same

Introduction

This blog post is about minutia. But, it’s a topic near and dear to me because it’s been my research focus since late 2007: Impact craters.

On December 10, 2013, Robert Morningstar – brought back onto Coast to Coast after appearing on their JFK conspiracy episode – made a claim about impact craters that is simply, completely, 100%, wrong. But, it’s one that I’ve seen made before, so here we go with the minutia blog post.

The Claim

Morningstar made the statement starting at 32:32 into the third hour of the program, and the text below is quoted through 34:38.

I saw one thing that really intrigued me, it looked like a crater with a uh, arrowhead in it, and the crater was called “Weird Crater*.” …

What’s weird about Weird Crater* is that triangle, uh that I saw in the thumbnail, is formed by the impact of three meteors all of the same diameter.

{George Noory: Isn’t that strange.}

That is not a-really possible. And this is a really strange phenomenon on the moon, it’s called the “doublet craters.” Around– surrounding the moon, there are double craters, uh, that appear regularly — dot-dot, dot-dot, dot-dot — you know? And they’re both the same size. It’s not possible. What is possible is artillery [laughs] in my estimation, in my view. … That makes two craters of the same size. But, to think that three meteors in the same diameter could hit one zone, in one crater, uh and the doublet phenomenon, tells me that not everything is right with the interpretation of uh, of the selenologists.

*Note: According to the USGS index of IAU-approved names, there is no such crater. I looked through all crater names beginning with “W” and the closest I found was Wyld and Wildt. There is nothing that has “rd” together that starts with “W” so either he is making this up, or the crater is not officially named that so I cannot locate it to examine it. While this is somewhat interesting, it is not actually relevant to the rest of this, though.

Double Craters and Crater Clusters and Crater Chains

To say “he’s wrong” would make this blog post short. And these days, unlike what my high school English teachers remember, I am much more verbose than that.

First off, there are at least three theoretical reasons why you would expect “doublet” or triplet craters or even chains of impact craters (I’m just dealing with impact craters here, not other forms like chains of pit craters).

The first theoretical reason is that you have a binary or trinary asteroid that strikes a surface. Or a weak asteroid that was pulled apart from an earlier pass – or just before impact – by tidal forces and strikes the surface. This is expected, and we know that many smaller asteroids are very weak – the “rubble pile” model has come into favor these days that posits that many asteroids are actually re-assembled after previous breakups. This means that they will be pretty weakly held together, and a close pass by a larger gravitational body can rip it apart.

Which brings me to the first-part-b theoretical reason – more evidence than a reason – for why you expect to see chains of craters: Bodies are ripped apart soon before impact and strike the surface like a shot-gun. Don’t think this is possible? What if Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 had impacted a moon instead of Jupiter, and soon after its breakup rather than a few orbits later? You would get a crater chain. We see these all the time on satellites of the outer planets, such as in the example below from Ganymede.

Crater chain on Ganymede.

The second reason we would expect it is the phenomenon of secondary craters: Craters formed from the ejecta blocks of a primary crater that go off and form their own craters. These most often occur in clusters and clumps and chains. One need look no further than the area around the young and large Copernicus crater on the moon to see examples of these.

Third is that it can easily happen by coincidence on older parts of the moon or any other object that’s already heavily cratered. I spent literally 10 seconds just now and found this region of the moon which shows several craters of very roughly the same size, some of them right next to each other.

So, right there, three reasons and plenty of examples of why you would expect – and we do see – craters appearing in pairs or groups right next to each other.

Craters of the Same Size

Another part of Morningstar’s claim is that the craters look to be the same size, which means they’re artillery fire. Sigh. This points to a profound ignorance of the cratering process in general. There’s not really a more polite way to say it.

We graph crater populations most often in what’s called a “size-frequency distribution,” which is basically a log-log plot that puts crater diameter on the x-axis and number of craters on the y-axis. It’s often binned in SQRT(2)*D diameter bins, such that one bin might go from 2-2.8 km, then 2.8-4 km, then 4-5.7 km, then 5.7-8 km, etc. The reason is that on this kind of plot, crater populations tend to follow a straight line, starting in the top left and going to the bottom right. Bill Hartmann, one of the founders of the field, has probably the easiest public-access explanation of this. Or, you can go to the intro of my thesis, section 1.4.3, pages 16-18.

What this means in simplest terms is that there are more small craters than large craters. Many, many more small than large craters. From my thesis work, there are about 11,000 craters larger than 20 km on Mars. 48,000 larger than 5 km. 78,000 larger than 3 km. 385,000 larger than 1 km. If you go just 50 meters smaller, there are another 40,000 craters on Mars, almost as many craters in that 0.95-1.00 km range as the entire number of craters >5 km put together. (No comparable database exists – yet – for the Moon.)

That boils down to, as I said, Morningstar is apparently ignorant of the cratering process and craters in general. Not only do you expect to find many craters of the same size (in the Mars case, nearly 50,000 just in a 50-meter-diameter spread), but it would be weird if they weren’t like that.

“Okay,” you may say, “but that’s observational. It could still be artillery fire because you’re just talking about what you have observed after that fire.”

Except that’s not the case: Asteroids form impact craters. Probably >90% of the impact craters in the inner solar system. So, we can look at their size-frequency distributions” and – hey! – they match those of craters. I’ll repeat: What we think causes impact craters (mainly asteroids) matches the size distribution of the craters themselves. As opposed to artillery.

Final Thoughts

Coast to Coast AM guests often say things that are just completely wrong. I often just shake my head. Earlier today, I was listening to an interview David Sereda gave, and almost literally nothing he said was true (I did a two-part podcast series on him — part 1 and part 2). In those cases, it’s so hard to know where to start, that I simply don’t.

I don’t know much more than the average skeptic about the JFK assassination conspiracy. So, when Morningstar spent just a few minutes out of a three-hour interview saying things that were completely wrong about craters, well, I pounced.