Fakery in Orbit: THE I$$

[MrSinclair]

I see something at 1:54-1:55 that looks like a drop that falls down and to the right across his shirt towards the floor.

[simonshack]

*
Dear Undoctored,

One thing we can ascertain with relative ease - is that Hadley is greenscreened into the "Space Station" environment:

This sort of "halo" around his arm is typical of what we may call "edge bleed" caused by imperfect chroma-keying :

HadleyClown_02.JPG (292.1 KiB) Viewed 20703 times

[Joukahainen]

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Dear Undoctored,

One thing we can ascertain with relative ease - is that Hadley is greenscreened into the "Space Station" environment:

This sort of "halo" around his arm is typical of what we may call "edge bleed" caused by imperfect chroma-keying :

HadleyClown_02.JPG

I am really more skilled with Photoshop and photo manipulation, but I do have to point out, that this kind of effect also happens sometimes when a) either the resolution of the video/image is not quite enough to draw out all the details, b) alternatively the refresh rate of the recorder is not high enough (especially with small details) or c) packing algorithms of video and image codecs "fail" (usually because of too large block size or too low bitrate)

In this case there is a good case to be made, that as this person seems to have very strongly haired arms, the very thin but overlaid hair causes the video to be unable to quite recognize their shape and colors and rather does a "blend" of the background and foreground (=hair) the best it can. The outer edges of this person's shirt are much more clear, as it has more redefined edges.

This example can of course be any of the cases as well as Simon's explanation of being a chroma problem and a bleed of edges when the image is combined with the green screen. This problem also happens more easily and often in similar situations. That is why we often see the same problem with (head) hair on Hollywood products and fake news.

Personally I have always had some problems with the weird perspective of this ISS videos. Often it is very difficult or even impossible to identify the distance to some objects shown at screen.

A good example is at around 2.45 when a very small droplets is shown under the rag on the left side of the screen. It goes first "down" (or seems to be going) for a very short while, but then suddenly again diagonally up towards the arms of the person and the rag. It is VERY difficult to say whether the droplet is in FRONT of the arm/fingers or BEHIND. Still not sure if it goes behind the finger and gets absorbed into the rag or is absorbed into the water already around the fingers. Anyways, it seems to change the direction quite suddenly, there must be some strong air current or something making it change direction perhaps. Thou the other droplets are not really affected the same way.

There is also one of those flying "micro meteoroids" again at 1.07, on the left side of the screen in front of the laptop. Seems to appear from nothing and just go diagonally down with quite some speed. Can be of course some piece of flint driven by the air conditioning, but...

Overall, the weird perspective especially when they do this "experiments" makes me believe this are indeed some sort of green/blue screen combinations and the background is recorded with either different lens/camera or with different focus setting used. The picture/video seems to be "in focus" in a very deep field and the only time it goes out of focus is when the droplets gets very super close to the camera. Which seems to have some sort of smudge on the lens that shows on the shirt of this person, or it's a some sort of plastic in front of the camera. If somebody knows more about the video camera lenses and their depth of perception capabilities and focus behavior, would be interesting to get some comments if I am only seeing what I want and that is why it feels weird. The image does have some small droplets right from the very start, so either the lens has that water already on it (maybe they tried the "trick" once just to be sure it works) or indeed there is some sort of plastic screen that has those droplets and it is somehow linked to the trick and how it is done.

Earlier there was a video in here where the Christmas decorations behaved very weirdly. When I watched it, I was sure there was an area encased with clear plastic which blew some air with strong velocity in order to keep some of the stuff "floating", and that some (or all) of the items had some strings which kept them "in place" .. as they seemed to rotate so weirdly around their axis with no obvious reason. Will try to find that video again. I think some people here already commented how weirdly the reindeer horns (or whatever) behave and whatnot.

[hoi.polloi]

Joukahainen, that's a good point about the hair. However, can you please try to find a YouTube video (that you trust is 'natural') which displays this kind of artifact? It may be that the chroma key problem Simon observes is more problematic than we assume. Do you really think the camera "blending" two things in focus will produce this identical manner of jagged edges around the figure?

[hoi.polloi]

You can especially see the "camera" just "freaking out" whenever he specifically interacts with the scenery or objects. The objects seem fine on their own but not when he crosses over more than one activity. The microphone chunks out when he's not holding it.

Why should round objects become rectangular "problems" when he moves behind them? He has to hold them for them to become smooth?

can_space_00.jpg (133.41 KiB) Viewed 20251 times

can_space_01.jpg (217.75 KiB) Viewed 20251 times

can_space_02.JPG (114.29 KiB) Viewed 20251 times

To me, I could be terribly wrong, but it seems slightly more likely (in my mind) that this is a mask or chroma issue of some kind, as Simon points out. The scenery could be just a video of a still scene. He is digitally inserted and special techniques have been applied to his image in order to acquire the 'weightless' stuff — e.g.; a watch, a microphone

See how the round object gains a sharp edge when his arm goes behind the 'wall frame'? What's the deal with that? Looks like simply a bad mask so that he can appear "behind" parts of the backdrop!

He could also be taken from the inside of a plummeting blue screen aircraft since the video is but 3 minutes long and it fades every 50 seconds or so. Could be stitched together from three or more plummet takes.

Also, not to be a conspiracy theorist, but in my image 2 zoom-in, do you notice the little blue Masonic owl face peeking out from above the exit?

[Joukahainen]

Joukahainen, that's a good point about the hair. However, can you please try to find a YouTube video (that you trust is 'natural') which displays this kind of artifact? It may be that the chroma key problem Simon observes is more problematic than we assume. Do you really think the camera "blending" two things in focus will produce this identical manner of jagged edges around the figure?

On my way to sleep, but a similar effect can be seen on this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paYuWCEZ2Kg , for example around 8m40s around the hair of this woman, when the "green screen" background is blended with her thin hair. I know from my own experience it's more problematic when you have a very thin space between thin filaments. Notice that this effect happens even during the green screen filming/imaging, even before you try to blend it with your new background. Of course the end result depends what kind of (color) background is used and how well is the chroma key fixed in the post production.

I personally think the "blurred blend" actually happens mostly because of the video encoding, but the underlying reason is that either the bitrate was not enough in the original footage, or the lack of resolution and/or bitrate during youtube conversion made the arm hair appear so smudged. It does not really matter what kind of background you use, but if you have this kind of situation where thin strings/hairs are shown with small gaps, they can easily get blurred as well in video as in still images. (Example: http://d1hw6n3yxknhky.cloudfront.net/02 ... still.jpeg and http://prepostconsulting.com/wp-content ... .50-PM.png). The edges of hair get blurred and smudged, unless you have very good lighting, enough resolution and reasonably in focus picture. Notice that especially in the second (bad quality image) the space between the hair curls gets a new shade of "green" which is somewhat blend of the green screen and the hair color, thou naturally also affected with the shadows caused by the hair. This happens even thou the curls are quite well defined and there are no "super thin filaments" like individual hair. The jpeg/png compression used in this image along with bad resolution adds to the effect.

This is how it could look when done "right" when doing still imaging: https://zklhmw.bn1301.livefilestore.com ... =103088192

There are some very thin hair and some of them very close to each other, but for several reasons like better lightning, good focus and good resolution of the output image, the hair looks ok and there is no "blending". The same general rules apply to still imagery as well as video in this case, thou in general video images have much wider range of artifact errors and the encoding of youtube videos makes it sometimes impossible to say which problems where in the original video and which were caused by post processing of either original converter (NASA/Person who uploaded the video) or Youtube itself.

I am in no way thinking this ISS images/videos are legit, just wanted to point out that in my opinion the arm hair problem should be considered. Thou as you pointed out in your latest reply, there are other points which point out to green screen/video composition too.

(Tried to find out some non green screen examples of video blurring in this kind of situations but seems to be hard to find proper word combinations, google gives mostly very unexpected results when trying to find using words that first comes to mind..)

I will check the complete video later on tomorrow again to see if I can find traces of chroma key bleed somewhere else on the video, I was mostly making my statement based on the Simon's screenshot and a quick one play through this image in fullscreen-HD mode.

[Thierry Legault]

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I personally have only one question - or two actually - for Mr. Legault. (The first question is a bit trivial perhaps - but anyway, here goes).

QUESTION N°1: Mr Legault, why have you presented to the public (on your website) your remarkable shot - from Sevilla, SPAIN - of the "ISS transiting across the eclipsed Sun" - TILTED at 90°? See, what I witnessed from the surface of Earth in Rome, ITALY the other day ...

...was THIS:__________________________________________Yet, you are showing this historical event TILTED at 90°? Why so?

QUESTION N°2: Mr Legault: you claim that the ISS transit you captured (across part of the eclipsed Sun) lasted for 0.6 seconds:

On the other hand, "DAZZA the cameraman" in New Zealand claims he captured (on Oct 2, 2013) a transit of the ISS across the non-eclipsed Sun - which lasted for 0.8 seconds > source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56t_ZJ8nzsQ

Surely, Mr Legault - if YOUR images are legit (of the ISS transiting across a 30% slice of the Sun disc in 0.6sec), then DAZZA's images (of the ISS transiting across 98% of the Sun disc in only 0.8sec) cannot possibly be authentic? Or was the "ISS" travelling about three times slower than usual, the other day? Saving fuel, perhaps - due to recent NASA budget cuts?...

Mr Shack, here is my reply

Question 1: on equatorial mount, the camera is generally not oriented horizontally but along celestial axis (declination and right ascension). Anyway, in space there is no up and down, Australian people see things upside-down compared to us. On astronomical forums where I published the pictures, nobody among thousands asked any question about that, it’s a non-problem.

Question 2: the duration of a transit can be between 0.5 second and 10 seconds. Each transit is specific. Of course the altitude of the ISS does not change much, but the distance of the ISS to the photographer can be completely different, if it passes at zenith of the observer (distance = 400 km) or close to the horizon (distance = up to several thousand km). And if the distance is bigger, the transit is longer and the apparent size of the ISS is smaller. Your calculations are wrong for at least one reason: you confuse distance and altitude. Yet, I explicitly mentioned the distance of the ISS to the observer in the comments of my Youtube video: 765 km.

I came here because you invited me politely with questions, and I always take time to reply. However, I have read the irony and the sarcasms against my work, suggesting that it is faked. So it’s my turn, let me say what I think of what I have seen browsing this forum.

The question of stars in the pictures of the ISS is a good example to start. You seem to turn around that subject endlessly, although it’s as obvious as the question of distance vs altitude. When the ISS is lighten but the Sun, it’s very bright (like the surface of the Earth in daylight below it) and needs a short exposure time, typically 1/100 to 1/1000s or shorter. This is much too short to records stars, which need exposures of one to several seconds at least. The pictures where you see stars are taken with such longer duration, when the ISS and the Earth below are in the dark, not lightened by the Sun. Thousands of people in amateur astronomy forums experienced that in astrophotography and it's obvious for them.

Another random example is this video of the Antares rocket explosion (image below). I will probably teach you something. A flare (reflection) inside a lens and its source (a very bright light) are always symmetrical with regards to the center of the image. I marked the center of the image with the diagonals (white lines), and the symmetry between the source and the flare is clear (blue line). You can check that’s it’s true for all other images of the explosion. This is a well-known property of flares inside lenses on photography and astronomy forums. Those are evidence that the camera really filmed something extremely bright. The fact that all flares look similar is just the sign that the lenses are of the same design or manufacturer, logical with smartphones. Again, what you take as evidence of fake because of your ignorance is exactly the opposite: an evidence of truth.



The ignorance and misunderstanding of the people here about subjects like astronomy, physics, photography, optics, video etc. is astonishing (and as usual, their certainties are as deep as their ignorance). The discussion about free fall, gravity and centrifugal force is really hilarious to anyone who knows a bit the subject. The question about the bright ISS passing in front of the dark side of the Moon is also hilarious, considering that a simple drawing made by a schoolkid can solve the question.

To reuse your words in the first page of this thread, I could continue to “jettison into the vacuum of space, one by one”, any other of your “evidences of fake”, and this is also applicable to the Apollo missions. But I won’t, you can do that by yourself if you are honest in your quest. So, this is my first and last message on this forum (I will unsubscribe in a few minutes). I have a job for living, a family, a house and a hobby (astronomy), all already taking all my time. I don’t have time for endless discussions with questions, replies, objections etc. like you did with another amateur (astronut). All that, to finish suspected of being part of NASA’s Big Conspiracy? No, thanks.

Anyway, I don’t have the ambition to change your belief. I say belief because it’s religious. Your belief is not about any kind of god, it’s: “NASA lies, the ISS does not exist”. You make me think of religious people, in the time of Copernic and Galileo who demonstrated that the Earth rotates around the Sun. Religious people refused to accept reality and continued to promote the Ptolemaeus system with the Earth at center of the Universe, that was extremely complex and did not correspond well to visible facts, just like your funny system of airplanes simulating the ISS. Like them, you interpret anything you don’t understand, whatever it’s black or white, as a new evidence that strengthens your belief. But any evidence we could bring that contradict your belief will be taken as a new fakery. Endless and useless.

It’s easy to watch the ISS passing in the sky, with a trajectory exactly corresponding to the prediction of Calsky or Heavens Above. It’s not difficult to speak on the telephone with another person in another country, measuring the time between the passages over the two persons and calculating the speed of the ISS (8 km per second). It’s not so difficult to take a telescope and watch at a solar or lunar transit according to the calculations of Calsky. You claim that you want evidences of the existence of the ISS but it’s a lie, you already have them under the eyes.

This forum looks like a sect, thinking that the rest of the world is hostile and is composed of two kind of people only: liars and stupid people who don’t see the lies (an easy way to feel superior without having to make any effort to deserve it…). A sect with its guru bringing The Light to the blind people. Paranoia is not far…unless there is a hidden ideological or political reason behind all those delirium. It could appear funny if the world would be a giant video game or movie behind your screen. But it’s not, and beyond your sarcasms there are real people who work(ed) hard and don’t deserve them. I know nobody personally in NASA but I highly respect them for what they did, especially all the missions like Voyagers, Galileo or Martian robots that allowed us to discover new worlds. You could have a little bit of legitimacy to laugh at them if you had high skills or if you had achieved something remarkable in your life. But your technical or scientific skills are null and you have achieved nothing except staying under cover behind your keyboard, taking no risk, thinking that you are smarter than the rest of the world and inventing conspiracies and absurd theories. What you do is just a shame.

The fact that not even one of all the dunces registered on this forum mentioned the confusion between distance and altitude is a good sign of its catastrophic level and the total lack of understanding of the ISS, its orbit and its visibility. No need to be a rocket scientist, all amateurs on astronomy forums understand the difference, even those who have never been interested in the ISS. But not you, apparently, even after years of pointless discussions about the ISS. Pitiful.

Don’t reverse the roles: I do NOT need to use Photoshop to make my pictures of the ISS because they are real. YOU use Photoshop to torture pictures and make them say what you want, and the absurd deductions you make from shadows, perspectives, camera and video compression artifacts show again all the extend of your ignorance.

You have chosen to spend your life denying reality; I have chosen to spend my life enjoying it, and that’s what I am going to do right now, skiing in the afternoon and tonight showing to friends a nice passage of the ISS and beautiful Iridium flares. I had a funny moment reading your pathetic efforts to demonstrate at any price that the ISS does not exist, but now I will forget you whatever you can say or think about me. Farewell.

[Flabbergasted]

Wow, that was as dull and insipid as it gets. What a disappointment.

I will unsubscribe in a few minutes.

Please.

[simonshack]

Your calculations are wrong for at least one reason: you confuse distance and altitude. Yet, I explicitly mentioned the distance of the ISS to the observer in the comments of my Youtube video: 765 km.

Mr. Legault,

I appreciate your taking time to register here and respond to my two questions regarding your (and Dazza's) "ISS" imagery. Alas, I have to say that I'm as puzzled as I was before reading your above replies - since none of them have cleared up / nor put to rest, in any way, my afore-mentioned questions. Let me start with the second one (the most important of the two) which simply questioned the large (by a factor of 1/3) time-speed discrepancy between your and Jazza's alleged depictions of the ISS transiting across the sun's disc :

Here is what Dazzathecameraman (your 'colleague' in New Zealand) clearly states in his Youtube video description notes :

"The ISS was about 625 km (390 miles) away from me, compared to the Sun's distance of 150 million km (93 million miles)."

Since you claim to have shot the ISS from a distance of 765km, this places you only 140km further away (from the ISS) than Dazza. How this minuscule 140km difference (out of 150 million km) could possibly cause "Dazza's ISS" to appear to travel three times faster than "your ISS" cetainly is - I will readily admit - way beyond my comprehension / and calculation abilities... Besides, your failure of even mentioning Dazza - or much less his stated 625km-distance - suggests that you didn't take my question seriously, or worse, that you fully realized that it was utterly unanswerable - and decided to "feign ignorance" so as to dodge the substance of my question altogether. I must guess that your stated admiration of NASA's purported skills & cleverness also includes their sadly notorious Never-A-Straight-Answer techniques.

As for my first (less important) question (which you dismiss as a "non-problem"), I can only wonder why on earth (pun intended) you would use an equatorial camera mount in Sevilla (37°22′38″N)? Surely, the equator is quite a bit further south - and surely, it would make more sense if you astronomical photographers posted / presented your images to the public (of events such as this latest solar eclipse) just as you saw the event from earth with your own eyes - and not tilted at 90°? There may not be any up or down in space, as you say, but I can see no rational motive for rotating any imagery as captured from the surface of earth.

I realize that you don't have much time for us, so I will stop here for now - hoping that you will at least try and clarify why "your ISS" appears to travel three times slower than "Dazza's ISS".

Again, thanks again for your time and your post - even if most of it contained cheap, haughty antagonistic pablum against our forum - rather than rational, clear-cut answers to my two simple and polite questions.


Here's a link to the two questions I submitted to Mr. Legault: http://cluesforum.info/viewtopic.php?p=2394800#p2394800

[Starbucked]

Well, obviously Monsieur Legault is unaware of the shuttle's 'Magic Bolt', amongst the mountain of weak links in the Nasa chain that makes the so called ISS an impossibility.

[Undoctored]

Since you claim to have shot the ISS from a distance of 765km, this places you only 140km further away (from the ISS) than Dazza. How this minuscule 140km difference (out of 150 million km) could possibly cause "Dazza's ISS" to appear to travel three times faster than "your ISS" cetainly is - I will readily admit - way beyond my comprehension / and calculation abilities...

In Legault's defense, the difference in distance to the sun is irrelevant. It's the distance from the observer to the moving object (ISS) that will affect the transit time. Last time I checked, an object's apparent size and therefore speed is inversely proportional to its distance from the observer. So a transit viewed at 625 km (Dazza) compared to one viewed at 765 km (Legault) should be 765 / 625 = 1.224 times faster. Not three times faster, but not a minuscule amount either.

[simonshack]

So a transit viewed at 625 km (Dazza) compared to one viewed at 765 km (Legault) should be 765 / 625 = 1.224 times faster. Not three times faster, but not a minuscule amount either.

Undoctored, not sure if "1.224 times faster" is the correct way to put it. Perhaps we can use percentage calculi as a way to compare the two distances / speeds?

Since 140 (the gap between 625 and 765) is about 18% of 765, we may say that DAZZA was placed approximately 18% closer to the "ISS" than Legault. So we should expect "DAZZA's ISS" to be 18% 'faster' than "LEGAULT's ISS".

So, if "DAZZA's ISS" were shown to be 18% 'faster' than "LEGAULT's ISS", it would all reasonably add up - and make sense.

However, as we are told and shown (by the two astrophotographers), "Dazza's ISS" clocks its transit across the entire sun's disc" at 0,8 seconds - while "Legault's ISS" would have taken 1.8 seconds (0.6 X 3) to transit across the entire sun disc (if there had been no solar eclipse).

Using the below-linked calculator, I found out that 1.8 seconds is a 225% longer timespan than 0.8seconds:
http://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculato ... entage.php

"DAZZA's ISS" is therefore not anywhere near 18% 'faster' than "LEGAULT's ISS" - but as much as 225% 'faster'.

Hence, we have a 207% discrepancy (225-18) between what we should expect in the real world - and what the two astrophotographers claim to be real, authentic imagery of the "ISS" transiting the sun's disc.

[Undoctored]

Undoctored, not sure if "1.224 times faster" is the correct way to put it. Perhaps we can use percentage calculi as a way to compare the two distances / speeds?

Since 140 (the gap between 625 and 765) is about 18% of 765, we may say that DAZZA was placed approximately 18% closer to the "ISS" than Legault. So we should expect "DAZZA's ISS" to be 18% 'faster' than "LEGAULT's ISS".

Simon, by "1.224 times faster" I meant faster by a factor of 1.224. That is, an increase of 22.4% and not 18%. Because the image sizes and speeds are inversely proportional to the distance of the camera, the numbers for the sizes and speeds associated with each photographer are flipped. So I divide by 625, not by 725.

To clarify, if DAZZA-distance = 625 and LEGAULT-distance = 765 then the image size and therefore speed for each, being inversely proportional, are as follows: DAZZA-speed = 765k and LEGAULT-speed = 625k (where k is the constant of proportionality). So, increase of DAZZA-speed as a proportion of LEGAULT-speed = 140k / 625k = 22.4% faster.

The rest of your argument, of course, still stands.

[Thierry Legault]

Okay, it's the continuation of the first question so I'll reply. Distance is the primary parameter but not the only one, the configuration and geometry of the transit can play an important role too. More details later (I'm in vacancy and doing much more interesting things).

[Thinktwice]

Well, Mr Legault said he was using an equatorial mount, which we can read about in Wikipedia here. Equatorial mount has nothing to do with where in the world you are. Looks like with this mounting technique, you align the telescope along the axis of the earth's rotation, so that the stars appear not to move as the telescope rotates as the earth rotates. To achieve this it seems you would indeed rotate and tilt the telescope so that the image produced would likely be in a different orientation than if you looked at the image with the naked eye.

Mr Legault mentioned iridium flares, so I have been using Calsky calculations to attempt to view these flares. So far after two attempts I did not see the flare yet, but it is likely due to inexperience viewing, not looking in the right place, cloud cover, etc, and I am going to keep trying.