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Overheard two guys at the coffee shop arguing about the moon landing
One guy kept saying the shadows in the photos don't match up, and the other just kept repeating 'they had the technology'. It made me realize how often these debates just go in circles without anyone checking basic facts. Anyone know a good site that actually breaks down the shadow argument with simple physics?
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cole9941mo agoMost Upvoted
Yeah that shadow thing is the oldest one in the book. People forget the moon's surface isn't flat, it's all hills and craters. A light source a long way off, like the sun, makes weird looking shadows on rough ground. There's a site called Bad Astronomy that had a whole section on this with side by side photos. They even recreated it with a toy and a single light bulb. It's not magic, it's just how light works on a bumpy place. Once you see the comparison it makes total sense.
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johnson.faith1mo ago
Totally, @cole994, Bad Astronomy broke it down perfectly.
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viola_ward24d ago
...and my buddy Mark, he's a photographer not a scientist, tried to prove the shadow thing himself one time. He borrowed his kid's moon boot toy and a flashlight, set it up on his coffee table with a crumpled up blanket for the moon surface. Took him like twenty minutes to get a shot where the shadows looked all wrong and pointed different ways. He texted me all excited like "see, I can fake the moon landing!" but really he just proved how easy it is to misunderstand what you're seeing when the ground isn't flat. That's the thing, people look at a photo for two seconds and think they've cracked some conspiracy, but they never actually try to recreate the conditions.
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