'Man on the Moon' — Collector's Edition

If NASA faked the moon landings, does the agency have any credibility at all? Was the Space Shuttle program also a hoax? Is the International Space Station another one? Do not dismiss these hypotheses offhand. Check out our wider NASA research and make up your own mind about it all.
hoi.polloi
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'Man on the Moon' — Collector's Edition

Unread post by hoi.polloi »

Recently came across this interesting book:

A picture chronology of man in space exploration
from moon cover.jpg
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Published in 1969 by Galina, Inc. 8609 Northwest Plaza Dr., Dallas, Texas 75225

It seems the "Mars" hoax has always been long in the works, as the last page of the book shows:
from moon last page.jpg
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It is also interesting in the sense that it shows how poor printing quality (even if good by yesterday's standards) can serve to mask sloppy compositing. We have the contemporary record to compare with this old book. See any interesting differences? Bear in mind discrepancies might be attributed to "printing error".
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Page 5

This one is interesting because of the various versions of this image that can be found online — black and white, grainy, less grainy — from its sequence. No, the Earth horizon is not wobbly because of a bent page. It is really that terrible.

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Page 7

Some modern versions to compare:
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Page 9

It is hard to believe, after being so familiar with actual spheres and not artistic ones, that people bought these images as actual depictions of "the Earth from space". Look at the clouds and how they completely fail to wrap and/or follow an actual spherical shape. How were these images made?

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Also, please look at Page 19 (My scan of the book - LARGER VERSION about 7 megabytes)
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This, to me, is a truly interesting comparison, in particular because it makes me ask what possessed the printers to mark up and distort the image with extremely sharp black splotches. Splotches that demonstrate very high quality printing quality on the smudges that betray an artificially low quality to the supposed photo. I guess this is all the company could acquire at the time? And they felt the need to add these lines for ... "clarity"? How odd.

And also, what process caused the printer to totally decimate the star of the show: that horizon line! It's ... atrocious. It's worse than a simplistic drawing of a circular Earth. Good thing they cleaned that all up this time:

And modern comparison (LARGER VERSION about 9 megabytes)
Gumdrop_Meets_Spider_-_GPN-2000-001100_smaller.jpg
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"The Finger Torque"
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Original (from 1969 book)
finger_torque_A.jpg
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Modern online version

What "printer error" of NASA's or of Galina Inc.'s causes white to become bright yellow, I wonder? Could it be something to do with the ink they used to add a shadow-like splotch on the "Finger Torque" sign?

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"The Porthole"

Two quite dramatic differences in quality between the print and the "original". What were these publishers up to, I wonder? And what is NASA up to now?

1969:
stronaught_old.jpg
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New:
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I will soon upload my scan but you can catch the larger modern version (called "Gumdrop Meets Spider") at Wickedpedia: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... 001100.jpg

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Clearly, if you look at these with any sort of discrimination, you can see the painterly qualities of this record. The "first American space walking" astronaut floating around with his umbilical cord looks smudged and painted. The Earth is a montage and pieced together in lieu of having a real photographic record of the boasted distances. The NASA artists were hard at work creating (and synchronizing) these images using hand tinting, hand painting, montage and other artistic techniques. A rather far cry from "photographic evidence" of the Apollo missions.

Of course, I will borrow a Simon-ism and suggest that you may chalk all this up to sloppiness and ineptitude if you want. It just seems a rather professional brand of it, if you ask me. If this is the kind of thing they were up to in the 1960's, I wonder what people with these sorts of habits might be doing now? And what might characterize their online presence?