Bad Astronomy. Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing 'Hoax'

In the pictures taken by the Apollo astronauts, no stars can be seen. Far from being evidence of a hoax, this is evidence men did go to the Moon. The bright surface and highly reflective spacesuits meant short exposure times were needed to take properly exposed pictures, and the faint stars were too underexposed to be seen.

The hoax-believers put their biggest stake in these very pictures. Almost without exception, the first and biggest claim of the conspiracy theorists is that those pictures should show thousands of stars, yet none is seen! Kaysing himself has used this argument numerous times in interviews. On the airless surface of the Moon, the conspiracy theorists say, the sky is black, and therefore stars should be plentiful (see chapter 4, “Blue Skies Smiling at Me,” for more about this phenomenon). The fact that they are not there, they continue, proves conclusively that NASA faked the images.

Admittedly, this argument is compelling. It sounds convincing, and it appeals to our common sense. When the sky is black at night here on Earth we easily see stars. Why should it not be true on the Moon as well?

Actually, the answer is painfully simple. The stars are too faint to be seen in the images.

During the day, the sky here on Earth is bright and blue because molecules of nitrogen in the air scatter the sunlight everywhere, like pinballs in a celestial pachinko game. By the time that sunlight reaches the ground, it has been bounced every which-way. What that means to us on the ground is that it looks like the light is coming from every direction of the sky and the sky appears bright. At night, after the Sun goes down, the sky is no longer illuminated and appears black. The fainter sky means we can see the stars.

On the Moon, though, there’s no air, and even the daytime sky appears black. That’s because without air, the incoming sunlight isn’t scattered and heads right at you from the Sun. Any random patch of sky is not being illuminated by the Sun, and so it looks black.

Now imagine you are on the Moon, and you want to take a picture of your fellow astronaut. It’s daytime, so the Sun is up, even though the sky is black. The other astronaut is in his white spacesuit, cavorting about in that bright sunlight, on that brightly lit moonscape. Here’s the critical part: when you choose an exposure time for the camera, you would set the camera for a brightly daylit scene. The exposure time would therefore be very short, lest you overexpose the astronaut and the moonscape. When the picture comes out, the astronaut and the moonscape will be exposed correctly and, of course, the sky will look black. But you won’t see any stars in the sky. The stars are there, but in such a short exposure they don’t have time to be recorded on the film. To actually see stars in those pictures would require long exposures, which would utterly overexpose everything else in the frame.

Put it another way: if you were to go outside at night here on Earth (where the sky is still black) and take a picture with exactly the same settings that the astronauts used on the Moon, you would still see no stars. They are too faint to get exposed properly.

Some people claim that this still won’t work because actually the Earth’s air absorbs starlight, making them fainter, so stars should look brighter from the surface of the Moon. That’s not correct; it’s a myth that air absorbs a lot of starlight. Actually, our atmosphere is amazingly transparent to the light we see with our eyes, and it lets almost all the visible light through. I chatted with two-time Space Shuttle astronaut and professional astronomer Ron Parise about this. I asked him if he sees more stars when he’s in space, and he told me that he could barely see them at all. He had to turn off all the lights inside the Shuttle to even glimpse the stars, and even then the red lights from the control panels reflected in the glass, making viewing the stars difficult. Being outside the Earth’s atmosphere doesn’t make the stars appear any brighter at all.

The accusation made by the hoax-believers about stars in the Apollo photographs at first may sound pretty damning, but in reality it has a very simple explanation. If the believers had asked any professional photographer or, better yet, any of the hundreds of thousands of amateur astronomers in the world, they would have received the explanation easily and simply. They also could easily prove it for themselves with a camera.

I am frankly amazed that conspiracy theorists would put this bit of silliness forward as evidence at all, let alone make it their biggest point. In reality, it’s the easiest of their arguments to prove wrong. Yet they still cling to it.

2. Surviving the Radiation of Space

In 1958 the United States launched a satellite named Explorer 1. Among its many discoveries, it found that there was a zone of intense radiation above the Earth, starting at about 600 kilometers (375 miles) above the surface. University of Iowa physicist James Van Allen was the first to correctly interpret this radiation: it was composed of particles from the Sun’s solar wind trapped in the Earth’s magnetic field. Like a bar magnet attracting iron filings, the Earth’s magnetic field captures these energetic protons and electrons from the Sun’s wind, keeping them confined to a doughnut-shaped series of belts ranging as high as 65,000 kilometers (40,000 miles) above the Earth. These zones of radiation were subsequently named the Van Allen belts.

These belts posed a problem. The radiation in them was pretty fierce and could damage scientific instruments placed in orbit. Worse, the radiation could seriously harm any humans in space as well.

Any electronics placed on board satellites or probes need to be “hardened” against this radiation. The delicate and sophisticated computer parts must be able to withstand this bath of radiation or they are rendered useless almost instantly, fried beyond repair. This is an expensive and difficult process. It surprises most people to learn that the typical computer in space is as much as a decade behind the technology you can buy in a local store. That’s because of the lengthy process involved in radiation-hardening equipment. Your home computer may be faster than the one on board the Hubble Space Telescope, but it would last perhaps 15 seconds in space before turning into a heap of useless metal.

Shuttle astronauts stay below the Van Allen belts, and so they do not get a lethal dose of radiation. The doses they do get are elevated compared to staying on the ground, to be sure, but staying below the belts greatly reduces their exposure.

Hoax-believers point to the Van Allen radiation belts as a second line of evidence. No human could possibly go into that bath of lethal radiation and live to tell the tale, they claim. The Moon landings must have been faked.

We’ve seen once before that basic logic is not exactly the hoax-believers’ strong suit. It’s not surprising they’re way off base here, too.

For one, they are vastly confused about the belts. They claim that the belts “protect” the Earth from radiation, trapping it high above us. Outside the belts, they go on, the radiation would kill a human quickly.

That’s not true, at least not totally. There are actually two radiation belts, an inner one and an outer one, both shaped like doughnuts. The inner one is smaller, and has more intense — and therefore more dangerous — radiation. The outer one is bigger but has less dangerous properties. Both belts trap particles from the solar wind, so the radiation is worst when an astronaut is actually inside the belts. I talked with Professor Van Allen about this, and he told me that the engineers at NASA were indeed concerned about the radiation in the belts. To minimize the risk, they put the Apollo spacecraft along a trajectory that only nicked the very inside of the inner belt, exposing the astronauts to as little dangerous radiation as possible. They spent more time in the outer belts, but there the radiation level isn’t as high. The metal walls of the spacecraft protected the astronauts from the worst of it. Also, contrary to popular belief, you don’t need lead shielding to protect yourself from radiation. There are different kinds of radiation; alpha particles, for example, are really just fast-moving helium nuclei that can be stopped by normal window glass.

Once outside the van Allen belts — contrary to the claims of the hoax-believers — radiation levels drop, so the astronauts were able to survive the rest of the way to the Moon. From the belts on out they were in a slightly elevated but perfectly safe radiation environment.

There was risk, though. Under normal circumstances, the solar wind is a gentle stream of particles from the Sun. However, there was a very real danger from solar flares. When the Sun’s surface flares, there can be a dramatic increase in the amount of radiation the sun emits. A good-sized flare could indeed kill an astronaut, very nastily and gruesomely. In that sense, the astronauts were truly risking their lives to go to the Moon because solar flares are not predictable. Had there been a good flare, they might have died, farther from home than anyone else in history. Luckily, the Sun’s activity was low during the missions and the astronauts were safe.

In the end, over the course of their trip to the Moon and back, the astronauts got, on average, less than 1