Thursday, July 27, 2017

Quick Debunk: Another Flat Earth fraud claiming to find "photoshop" evidence in NASA image

Many Flat Earthers will post this meme:



Which is, of course, a complete and utter fraud and lie on the part of Flat Earthers.

The meme features a squashed and cropped version of this image of Buzz Aldrin coming down the ladder of Apollo 11 in frame AS11-40-5868:


Flat Earth liars have purposefully extended the frame and added in the picture of the Earth.


Now, WHO is lying to you?


The ever astute @FlatSlugBrains also pointed out that it would be impossible for the Earth to appear that low in the sky from the Apollo landing sites (any of them, much less Apollo 11).  This wasn't obvious to me at first but it is a logical consequence of the Moon being tidally locked to the Earth, the position of the Earth in the sky doesn't change much on the Moon!  It wobbles around a bit (lookup Lunar Libration) but stays in that area of the sky.

The Apollo 11 landing site is located at 0.6875 N by 23.4333 E

Here is the resulting view -- the Earth is VERY high in the sky -- I had to expand the Field of View to about 80° to capture it -- so that's about 70° above the horizon.


If you download Celestia and want to recreate this here are the steps:

Navigation > Goto Object (Enter: Moon, 0.6875 N, 23.4333 E, 1 (km))
Navigation > Select Object (Enter: Earth)
hit 'C' to center the Earth
Shift-Left Drag (up and down) to change the field of view
Left Drag to position Earth
Left/Right arrow keys to rotate the view

Observant readers will notice my time is way in the future.  You can use 'L' to speed up time ten x per keypress -- leave Earth centered in that case to see how it wobbles around.  The backslash key will return time to normal speed '\' (don't confuse with forward slash '/').


In case it is deleted, here is the meme in question:



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