Cross-Hair Cover-Up

On many Apollo pictures you can see a grid of crosses superimposed over the image. These cross-hairs, also called reticles or fiducals, are made by a device called a Reseau plate (shown on right). This is a sheet of etched glass installed in the camera just over the film, and is useful for calibrating photographs or checking for lens distortion. Since the cross-hairs are inside the camera, they will naturally appear in front of everything that is photographed.

So how in heaven [asked Bennett and Percy in the 1999 edition of their book], or on earth, does an object get in front of the reticle? Putting it another way, how could any reticles get behind objects? This is a technical impossibility--unless the photograph has been adjusted or "diddled with" which is very loud Whistle-Blowing. (Dark Moon, 1999, p. 68)

I hate cross-hairs. No Apollo denier has convincingly explained how or why they got covered, let alone how they prove the moon landings were faked. Percy puts on a brave front with his theory of diddled pictures, but he's whistling in the dark: lunar pictures are just as easy to edit as earthbound images. They are a classic example of how the deniers try to fob off something weird as if it means something.

On page 68, the authors of Dark Moon recount part of their interview with Hasselblad technician Jan Lundberg. "Back at Hasselblad we went on to investigate another problem, the case of the disappearing cross hairs." And what did Lundberg say when when this problem was put to him? We are not told. Apparently those two cross-eyed investigators forgot to ask him, or they didn't like his answer.

So in light of Bennett and Percy's failure at cross-examination, we must solve the mystery ourselves. That's easy enough. All I had to do was tape some homemade "Reseau plates" into a ten-dollar snap camera to get pictures like this:

and this...

...and this ...and this

...and even this.

As for what is causing those lines to leach out, darned if I know. (What do you think I am, a photographer?) When I first put together this page in 2002 I passed on the theory of "emulsion bleed": i.e., really brightly-exposed areas in a film (such as spacesuits) spill over onto the darker parts (such as cross-hairs). This "emulsion bleed" can also work with digital cameras, as in this "technically impossible" image of the sun in front of Science World:

Then I got to see the latest version of Dark Moon. In one of their few rewrites, Bennett and Percy put away their childish whistles, offer a much more plausible theory, and (at least to my paranoid mind) rather shabbily shift the blame to a brother denier for embarrassing them with this non-anomaly:

So how does an object ever get in front of a reticle? This question was first asked by US researcher Ralph René. These partially hidden reticles may be the result of over exposure but this observation prompted us to continue looking for other possible reticle anomalies in the Apollo photographs. (Dark Moon, 2001, p. 68)

So they are still willing to carry the cross, and this time with an even sillier illusion.

Pulling Hairs

On the Man on the Moon picture, the central large reticle is just below Buzz Aldrin's right knee, below the centre of the picture. David Percy has duly noted this phenomenon, and has duly presented his wild theory that the cross-hairs were pasted on afterward. The truth, however, is more prosaic. It is all a matter of subtraction and addition. It seems odd that a professional photographer should not have considered (or suggested) the effects of cropping. Often the published pictures were not what was photographed. Sometimes they were trimmed for artistic effect, even if it played havoc with the cross-hairs. And that is one of the things that happened to the "full" image on page 68 of Dark Moon.

Here is the lower left corner of Dark Moon's version of the "Man on the Moon" portrait next to the same part of the uncut Hasselblad image. If you count the treads in the rightmost bootprint of each, you will see that a substantial percentage has been taken off the bottom of Dark Moon's "full area."

The result of this cutting, of course, is that the cross hairs got shifted downward. (And who sliced off a piece of Percy's picture? Your guess is as good as mine.)

Not only has the bottom been shortened, but the top has been increased, which moved the crosses even lower. In the original photograph, the top ends just above Aldrin's head. What looks like the blackness of space is really the blackness of unexposed film.

How can we tell the difference between black and black? The evidence is all on film. For every great picture the astronauts took, they took lots of crummy ones. (Hey, nobody's perfect.) And right after Neil Armstrong photographed The Man on the Moon, he gave the camera to Buzz who accidentally took this blurry closeup of Neil's space suit. Even though this particular picture never made it to the National Geographic, it serves our purpose by showing exactly where the edges lay. If we place these two images side by side with their bottoms lined up, then the illusion disappears. The cross hairs line up perfectly.

So how did Aldrin's portrait get shifted down? Because of the design of the Hasselblad camera. Unlike most cameras which transport the film from side to side, film in the Hasselblads was advanced vertically, like a movie camera. (You can read more about the lunar Hasselblads here.)

So when a roll of this vertically-arranged film was placed in the print-making machine, it was possible to move the image (and its cross hairs) slightly up or down from the centre. The resulting print could have a top border that was thicker than its bottom. (You can see these variations for yourself by looking at some of the Hasselblad images on the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal.) Naturally, you do not see cross hairs shifted to the right or left on an uncropped picture.

When the printmakers added some black space above Buzz's portrait, they were interested in aesthetics, not the feelings of some future conspiracy buff. It wasn't the only example of post-processing that can potentially upset the upsettable. The Johnson Space Center has a version of the Man on the Moon picture that was rotated to make the horizon level and Aldrin stand straight, with the result that the reticles appear tilted. Perhaps it's only a matter of time before some hoaxmonger will become desperate enough to tout that image as irrefutable proof of something or other.

(2005 update: The preceding section was put together before I saw the latest image scans on the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal. The new scan of AS11-40-5903 is much sharper and clearer than the previous web image and bound to give the deniers fits. It also has intact borders which show the cross-hairs neatly centred. It's nice to be proven right by such august company. Anyway, I'm keeping this section just to show the kind of research that Bennett and Percy should have done.)