Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Robert Morningstar on C2C last night

(revised with thanks to 'Trekker' who corrected my first draft)

       Robert Morningstar describes himself as a "civilian intelligence analyst." I think he's a buffoon in the mold of Hoagland & Bara. He says this Apollo image shows a crashed spacecraft on the far side of the Moon:


        The craters in that frame don't have names, but the nearest named craters are Diderot and Delporte. Judging by their known diameters (20 km and 45 km respectively,) the "object" is about 10 km long.

        My message to Morningstar, Hoagland, Bara: IT ISN'T GOOD ENOUGH to show a 40 year old image whose resolution might  be ~25 m/px, and fail to examine the far better images in the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter image library. Here is one of them, from the WAC* to confirm that the same craters are nearby. The crashed spacecraft is in the center of that frame, and looks less like an object and more like a depression.

       That was at 125 m/px. Zooming to 8 brings in the NAC* image and the feature fills the frame.  Oh look --  a 10 km long spacecraft with craters on it!

       Morningstar says this is an Apollo 12 image, but in fact it's from the Apollo 15 pan camera, and therefore would have had a resolution of ~2 m/px. It's frame number AS15-P-96251, one of a stereo pair (with 9630.) Here it is, folks.

Artillery fire
        By the way, Morningstar's discussion of paired lunar craters of the exact same size was too precious for words. There are too many of these to be natural, he asserted. Artillery fire is a more likely explanation. George Noory didn't bat an eyelid.

        Friar Occam, you're needed on the overnight radio. AGAIN.

Cockpit voice recorders
        Data Storage Equipment (DSE) was installed in all Apollo Command Modules (and DSEA in Lunar Modules) from Apollo 8 on. The equipment recorded conversation among the crews, and could be dumped at high speed to the ground whenever Mission Control wanted. The point was to have a record of crew conversation while the spacecraft were behind the Moon, just in case something went wrong. Morningstar mentioned this as though he'd just personally discovered this Great Secret, eliding the fact that it's been well discussed on Internet forums for many years now. He made a total ass of himself by stating that the DSE was installed "without the crews' knowledge." Oh dear, oh dear.

=============================
[1] The P is not an identifier of the film magazine, as Morningstar alleged. It identifies the pan camera (details here, if anyone's interested.) He was also wrong in stating that NASA identifies Apollo film magazines by a single letter. The ID was a number-letter combo.

Update: The Lunar and Planetary Institute does actually use letter-only mag IDs, and there is in fact a magazine P in their nomenclature. However, the filenames of the images themselves follow NASA practice and use a number. So it's still true that AS15-P-9625 means the Apollo 15 pan camera, not mag P.

* WAC and NAC mean Wide Angle Camera and Narrow Angle Camera, on Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

19 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ah yes the target of Apollo 20...

Trekker said...

And when you zoom in on the 'artifact' from 64m/pixel to 32m/pixel, it changes from an 'outie' to an 'innie' - i.e.a depression rather than a mound: http://bit.ly/IG18EC

Trekker said...

Actually, just looking at your link again, you've put the anomaly in the wrong place.

On the pic that opens on clicking your link, it's near the bottom left, not in the centre. It's located above the 'double crater' - (one of which is the well-defined, flat-bottomed one) about halfway between Diderot and Hilbert G.

Trekker said...

Don't publish this comment if you don't want to, but this paragraph is completely wrong:

"The large irregular crater at left is Tsiolkovsky. The more perfectly round, smaller, crater above and to the left of the "spacecraft" is Delporte, at 16° S 121.6° E. The diameter of Delporte is 45 km, so that's about the length of this "spacecraft."

Zoom out. Tsiolkovsky is much further away. The 'large irregular' crater is the one I referred to in my previous post as the double crater. The anomaly isn't near Delporte. It's right in the centre of this: http://bit.ly/19CPVve

Zoom out to get a more accurate idea of the context.

expat said...

Quite right, Trekker. Thank you. I've amended.

MeanGreen said...

Expat - This came out in late 2006-early 2007 and was shown to be done with clay models - "Apollo 20"
Morningstar is really reaching there ;-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6nQiJ3hP-s

expat said...

New section added

Robert Ghostwolf's Ghost said...

Tonight on C2C--Freemasons on Mars! Whoda thunk? Wonder if they lived in little condos?

"Founding investigator of The Cydonia Institute, George Haas, and geoscientist, Bill Saunders will discuss their analysis of geoglyphic formations on Mars and how they have direct correlations to the Freemasons. "

expat said...

Not just freemasons, but a parrot, a road-runner, a viking helmet etc etc. George Haas is totally infantile.

Robert Ghostwolf's Ghost said...

Crikey! I just checked out his site. What a treasure trove--stag and pigeon, stag and finch, stag and raptor. Why, they're as plain to see as the toes on your face!

Robert Ghostwolf's Ghost said...

Viking schmiking. If that's not a depiction of the Shroud of Turin, I'll eat a chupacabra. Looks like irrefutable evidence that Jesus spent time on Mars.

Anonymous said...

Listening to "Herr Morgenstern" was so painful, I finally shut it off...You are correct, Friar Occam should pay these guys a visit with a "Flagellum Dei" and explain just how to understand the meaning of his "razor"....Punctuating his explanation with a crack or two of his whip....(A ghost monk would be just the thing for George, he likes ghosts and spirits...)

Robert Ghostwolf's Ghost said...

I caught an hour or so of George Haas and Bill Saunders before drifting off to sleep last night, and was ready to write them off as poster boys for terminal pareidolia, until...I realized that the parrot glyph they discovered is a depiction of the famed Norwegian Blue, renowned for its beautiful plumage and its tendency to pine for the fjords. Now, I have to wonder if maybe they're on to something after all.

expat said...

Well, you realize the chief veterinarian attesting to the parrot's authenticity is George Haas's wife, right?

Robert Ghostwolf's Ghost said...

I did not know that, but it's not surprising, because their claim of the parrot having "seventeen points of anatomical correctness" is utter twaddle. I count only eleven, and there's a conspicuous absence of genitalia, which is the generally recognized as necessary for true anatomical correctness. It does have beautiful plumage, though, like all Norwegian Blues.

Chris Lopes said...

@Robert Ghostwolf's Ghost
Haas is another Hoagland wanna-be. Like Hoagie, he pretends to be using science. Also like Hoagie, he's particularly intolerant to criticism. You'll find him on the FB page Final Frontier a lot trying to sell this BS, where he usually gets shot down by Don Davis among others.

Robert Ghostwol's Ghost said...

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the info! I'm sure I've heard him before, because falling asleep to C2C has been one of my guilty pleasures for over fifteen years. However, since it's on fairly late, and I'm a firm believer in the benefits of preventive self-medication, I wasn't sure which perveyor of Martian pareidolia he was. It's just too darn hard to keep up with all those rascals because there are just too darn many of them. Cheers!

Dee said...

Robert Ghostwolf's Ghost ,

Even the pining for the fjords bit of the Norwegian Blue has been debunked here:

"[the Norwegian Blue] shuffled off its mortal coil around 55 million years ago, but the fjords in Norway were formed during the last Ice Age and are less than a million years old".

Yes, it has come to this, we're debunking debunker's jokes. :)

Nice article Expat & Trekker. It's interesting how things can morph when zooming in and out. Perhaps this spaceship is actually an "art work" supposed to only look like something when viewed in a very specific and unique way. Or all other imagery has been tampered with! Because as we all know observations of alien handy work are way too cool and lucrative to be wrong, never mind being questioned ;p

Robert Ghostwolf's Ghost said...

Too much, Dee! I suppose next we'll find out that swallows really are able to carry coconuts.

And how do we know the Norwegian Blue didn't really come here from Mars? As they like to say on a certain History Channel series, "some ancient alien theorists believe it's possible..."

Have a great weekend, everyone!