Unpopular opinion: the moon landing faking theory misses basic physics

I was at a bar in Austin last March when a guy started explaining how the moon landing was filmed in a studio. He pointed at shadows and said the lighting was off. But I looked into it myself with a $15 book on orbital mechanics and read about how sunlight scatters differently without an atmosphere. It just doesn't hold up to actual math. Has anyone else here actually tried to build a model of the lighting instead of just repeating what they saw online?

2 comments

2 Comments

tyler_hernandez2d ago

Is it really that deep though? Like I get that the guy at the bar was annoying, but the whole moon landing conspiracy thing is more of a cultural joke at this point than an actual debate. People see a five minute YouTube video and suddenly think they're physicists. The lighting thing always cracks me up, because if you actually try to map out where the sun would be relative to the shadows in those photos, it lines up fine.

walker.alex1d ago

Buy a decent sky tracking app and plug in the coordinates and time from those photos. It shuts down the whole argument in like two minutes.