Moon Hoax

Response to question asked Dec. 20, 2001

A good reference on the "moon hoax" is the "Bad Astronomy" website hosted by astronomer Phil Plait, www.badastronomy.com/. His page refuting many of the faked moon landing arguments can be found at: http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.html.

As for not being able to see the lunar equipment, this can be refuted by some quick math. Let's assume that the largest equipment on the moon was about 16.5 feet across (5 meters). I think that all of the equipment was smaller than this, and therefore harder to see.

The distance to the moon is, on average, 384,000,000 meters (240 thousand miles). The angular size of an object is the object's size divided by its distance, as long as the distance is much larger than the size. Si, in this case, the angular size is 13 billionths of a radian (the metric unit of angular measure). To convert from radians to degrees, multiply the angular size in radians by 180 and divide by pi (3.1415....). So, the lunar equipment would appear to be 750 billionths of a degree across.

Astronomers refer to angular size in "arcseconds." There are 3600 arcseconds in a degree. Our eye can see objects about 60 arcseconds in size. The best telescopes on the ground can see objects 0.5 arcseconds in size. The Hubble telescope can see things much more clearly, down to about 0.05 arcseconds. To find the size of the moon equipment in arcseconds, we can multiply the size in degrees by 3600. Doing so, we find that the largest lunar equipment would be about 0.003 arcseconds in size, or about 17 times smaller than what the Hubble Telescope can see!

There are other problems to finding lunar equipment. The moon moves across the sky at a rate of 0.5 arcseconds per second due to its orbit around the Earth. The Hubble telescope is not programmed to correct for that motion, and any pictures of the moon are blurred a bit because astronomers have to make a guess as to how to tell the telescope to move while taking a picture. Even a short, one-second exposure of the moon (which has been taken) is somewhat blurred!

There is some talk of trying to take a picture of an Apollo landing site at sunrise, when the lunar lander's shadow will be very long and possibly visible, but I haven't heard that such an exposure has been approved.

Unfortunately, it usually does little good to argue with people who have become set in the opinion that the moon landings were faked. Today's culture seems to revel in various "conspiracy" theories, and no amount of proof will change that mindset. The proof always involves "magic" with numbers like what I did above (ancient Greek geometry -- another government invention?) or "faked" images.

Suppose we spent $500 million on a satellite to go to the moon and take pictures of the lunar landing sites. The "moon hoax" people would then claim that those images are faked. And heaven forbid that an astronomer should try and convince people that we actually landed on the moon or that we are not communicating with aliens, since we are always part of the "conspiracy." :-) [How could you ever get 20,000 astronomers to agree not to talk about aliens? Besides, if I had facts proving we didn't go to the moon or that we have contacted ET, I'd be very rich if I talked.]

(written by) The Ask An Astronomer team

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