Reflections on the Moon

        In a lecture at the Earth-Keeper 2014 Star-Gate Event in Arizona late last year, Richard Hoagland attempted to deal with a logical objection to his interpretation of this lunar image:

image credit: China National Space Administration, corrupted by RCH

        The image is from the Chinese Chang'e 3 lunar lander that touched down in Mare Imbrium on 14th December 2013. Hoagland loaded it into Photoshop™ and used the EQUALIZE tool. I commented on the technique a year ago when Hoagland first explained it, and astronomer Stuart Robbins did his typically rigorous job on it, on 1st May 2014. Hoagland tells his fans that the CCD detector noise in the sky is not noise but part of a vast glass dome over Mare Imbrium.

        The logical objection (other than the simple fact that the whole idea is crazy) is that the same noise pattern can be seen everywhere else in the left half of the image where there is black. Specifically, in the deep shadow under the spacecraft. In the Arizona lecture, Hoagland pre-empted this objection  (at 1:27:00 in the Youtube vid) by reminding us that the lunar regolith is rich in micro-particles of glass, and that therefore it's not surprising that we see that pattern down there. It's simply a reflection of the sky.

Proposition: Lunar regolith is reflective.

Corollary: From chest height, standing on the Moon, the all-black sky will be seen, reflected, in the lunar surface.

Experiment: Go to the Moon, take a good quality photograph from chest height.

Result:

 image credit: NASA/JSC

The proposition is falsified.

Hoagland: They come in threes

        Reports of Richard Hoagland's eternal silence, it seems, were grossly exaggerated. The self-described "Big Man" was back yesterday, for two hours on John Wells's Caravan to Midnight internet radio show^{note 1}. This makes it even more surprising that he hasn't been on Coast to Coast AM since late April. Speculative explanations such as mortal illness are now down in flames, so maybe there really is some bad blood around.

        Anyway, back he was, and as crazy as ever. He reported progress on his new book, The Heritage of Mars: Remembering Forever, which he first announced back in November 2000, then announced again in April 2012. The progress -- "I'm working on it, hoping to have it out by 2016"^{note 2}. Not exactly a fast worker, our Richard.

        The conversation was very wide-ranging, taking in world politics as well as the "face" on Mars, the "glass" on the Moon, and other silliness. Hoagland proclaimed, as he has on several previous occasions, that we are in a "pre-disclosure" situation. His main thesis was that three separate space agencies are "leaking like crazy," and that must mean something. Here are his data points.

1. NASA - the femur on Mars

2. ESA - Comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. "Not a comet but an ancient space station."

3. Chinese National - "glass towers" on the Moon


        John Wells just rolled over and played Noory. In other words, he lapped up this nonsense as if it were true. He didn't remark, for instance, that there is no contextual support for the "femur." Sure, it looks a bit like a human femur, but if it were, wouldn't there be other bones lying around as well? Wouldn't the house this human once lived in, the place where he went to work, be visible?

        Wells didn't so much as ask how Hoagland thought he knew that 67P was a space station. Nor how publication of an image exactly as had been long anticipated could amount to "disclosure." He didn't understand image processing well enough to understand how Hoagland had manipulated the Chang'e picture to make the "glass" appear (this blog explained it back in April).

Isis
        So then we moved on to world politics. Hoagland made some very strong statements about the apocalyptic threat posed by the Islamic Caliphate Army, currently rampaging through the Middle East making the heads of infidels roll.

        Hard to disagree with that. But then he went off into cloud-cuckoo land over the name ISIS^{note 3}. It won't surprise readers of this blog to know that he instantly connected it with the Egyptian god Isis. Neither he nor Wells stopped to think that a) an acronym is not a name, or b) that ISIS is only a transliteration of whatever is the arabic equivalent of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or c) that more recently these thugs have been referring to themselves as just the "Islamic State", implying that their brutal ambitions may stretch beyond the I and the S^{note 4}. Hoagland misunderstood everything to the point of saying this:

"My colleague Stan Tenen, who's been doing for 30 years amazing language studies ... he is of the opinion that what you name something is very close to its intrinsic hyperdimensional torsion field wave packet."

To me, that  sentence has no conceivable meaning. Hoagland added:

"I know this sounds like mumbo-jumbo to most people, because they haven't studied it."

        He's right about that. It does sound like mumbo-jumbo. Actually it is mumbo-jumbo. Where would I study hyperdimensional torsion field wave packets, assuming I wished to?



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[1] That link may not work for long, since the show is supposed to be pay-per-view.

[2] According to Hoagland, 2016 is the "key year" when all the things that didn't happen in December 2012 will really happen. He didn't say how he knows that. And I guess he forgot that he claimed that 2010 was "the year of disclosure."

[3] At one point he was playing the same game with the International Space Station, calling it IS(i)S.

[4] The original arabic is ad-Dawlah l-'Isla-miyyah .

I have a dream today

"A stunning validation..."

"World-changing...."

"Revolutionary..."

"Amazing..."

"Paradigm-changing..."

"History-making..."

"This changes everything..."

        My dream today is that I did not hear all that ridiculous hyperbole on Coast to Coast AM last night, as Richard Hoagland returned after a six-month absence to present his latest cock-and-bull story, a manipulated lunar image from the Chinese soft-lander Chang'e 3 that Hoagland claims shows glass skyscrapers on the Moon.

image credit: CNSA, stretched by Hoagland

        My dream is that I imagined all that, and what really happened was this:

Noory: "Welcome back to Coast-to-Coast, Richard, it's been a while."

RCH: "Nice to be back. Look at this amazing, stunning, history-making image from Chang'e 3. Glass skyscrapers on the Moon, just as I've been saying for 20 years."

Noory: "That's just noise in the camera, Richard. Anything else?"

        That would have taken less than a minute -- about all the silly image was worth. I'm afraid, though, the reality is that Hoagland stretched this to a full hour. He did it first by saying the same thing six times, with increasing hyperbole, and then by developing a whole fantasy of geopolitical intrigue. He even managed to make a connection to the fact that President Obama gave a gift of carrot seeds^{note 1} to the Pope.

S - T - R - E - T - C - H
        What the incompetent pseudoscientist did to arrive at this travesty was to grab the image from the Chinese National Space Agency site, load it into Photoshop, and apply the Equalize tool. "Equalize" might have been better described as "Stretch," because that's what it does to the image's dynamic range.

        If there are no black pixels in the image, it finds the darkest pixel and says "let that be black."  If there are no white pixels in the image, it finds the lightest pixel and says "let that be white."In this case, there was plenty of black around, but no peak white, so the pseudoscientist's manipulation had the effect of driving every part of the image toward white. He called it "just like turning up the gain," but that's not what it is. It's not revealing anything except random noise.

         Such is the extent of Hoagland's incompetence that he didn't even think to perform the most obvious cross-check that any honest investigator would have done immediately -- if there's anything there, it would show on the 0.5 m/px high-definition images from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. I don't care how "flimsy" he claims this structure to be, something would be visible if it's real. Even if the structure itself is transparent, we'd see the robots that he claims are standing around waiting to repair holes.

        Here's a permalink to the landing area. Have a look around. See anything? No, of course not.

Crimes and misdemeanors on the www
        Hoagland accompanied this performance with a web page -- the first contribution to his ghastly web site for a year or more. He says it took him four months to write it, but it's also a demonstration of his incompetence. The page is WAY too big, with far too many large inline images -- it should have been broken up into at least six pieces, and the images reduced in size.It only renders correctly in MSIE -- in more advanced browsers, such as Firefox, the background tiling runs out 60% of the way through and the last 40% is rendered in white text on a white background. The W3C markup validation service reports 136 markup errors and 23 warnings. The text includes crazy, crazy stuff like opals falling out of the glass domes and lying around on the ground. He asserts that Emily Lakdawalla is "a member of the NASA community", which is untrue-- she's a senior editor at the Planetary Society.

        Hoagland's fans will no doubt have loved all this. Personally, I hated it. Gross errors in bringing space science to the public is what I'm here to fight.

Update
        I grabbed a different moonscape from the CNSA site and equalized it (Paint Shop Pro rather than Photoshop, but it's the same algorithm). This is my result:

image credit: CNSA, stretched by me

Voilà! Exactly the same noise pattern.


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[1] The Chinese lunar rover is nicknamed Jade Rabbit. "And what do rabbits eat?" asked Hoagland conspiratorially. Noory didn't even laugh. In the second hour, he came up with the notion that the latitude of the Chang'e landing site, 44°N, was a coded message "To the 44th President, give us what we want or else." It's a good thing Hoagland isn't a politician -- his insane ideas about geopolitics would get us all in  trouble very quickly.

Latitude and longitude

        Biggie congrats to the Chinese Space Agency, that successfully landed Chang'e 3 and deployed the Yutu rover at 44.1143°N, 19.5149°W on the Moon. Here's a permalink to the landing site in the ACT-REACT LRO lunar map.

        Richard Hoagland was torn from his nice warm bed to comment on this event with C2C host John B. Wells last night. He went straight for the least useful aspect of it -- the numerology.

Long, not Lat, Richard dear
        For at least 15 years Hoagland has been telling us (screaming, it seems like) that the 19.5° latitude is extra special. Magic. Ritual. Hyperdimensional. In support of this, he has cited Jupiter's red spot, Olympus Mons, Neptune's dark spot and Mauna Kea. All of which are NOT at 19.5°, but that's perhaps a minor detail. Now suddenly it's the 19.5° longitude that's magic/ritual/hyperdimensional, as Hoagland proclaims that the Chinese know all about the ritual and observed it correctly. Richard Hoagland is confused, you might say. If you were less charitable you might say Hoagland is crazy.

The ETs know, y'know
        It got worse. He went sailing off into a total fantasy about how this was China's message to the extraterrestrial intelligences. Something along the lines of "Look you guys, we're the ones to talk to as representatives of Planet Earth. See how LEET we are -- the Americans are crap, basically"

        I would have collapsed laughing if I hadn't already been collapsed in bed at the next bit. He said the choice of 19.5° longitude would have sealed the deal. The ET high command would be thinking "Hmmm, these Chinese really understand. The magic 19.5, WOW!!" This would require that a) The ETs chose exactly the same point on the Moon to designate as the 0° longitude, b) They count in decimals, and c) They also divide a circle into 360 degrees.

        Richard Hoagland is very confused. My message to the Chinese: WELL DONE. To Coast-to-Coast: GET SOMEONE WHO KNOWS WHAT HE'S TALKING ABOUT, FOR GOD'S SAKE.