Doing What Comes Unnaturally

Given that natural sunlight cannot generate shadows like those in (20) and (22), these images suggest that such pictures were not taken on the Moon.

Dark Moon, p. 22

If this picture from Apollo 14 had been taken on the moon, so we are told by the authors of Dark Moon, then the shadows of the rocks and the lunar module should be parallel.

Dark Moon's photo analyst offers a "corrected" demonstration of how he believes this picture should appear if "naturally" illuminated. As we shall see, the only thing David Percy has demonstrated is that he has some odd ideas about how shadows behave.

Let's begin our analysis of Percy's analysis by getting one quibble out of the way. All the Apollo landings took place in the lunar morning with the sun in the east, so the shadows were actually pointing west, meaning Percy has mislabelled both shadow directions. But he was correct in on thing: the shadows were on the moon.

When Ed Mitchell took AS14-68-9486, he was standing approximately 80 yards northwest of the Lunar Module Antares, at the spot marked "H.PAN 14" on the map shown right. The camera was pointing southeast as indicated by the yellow arrow.

AS14-68-9486 was part of the Station H Panorama. Click here to see the entire sequence, which shows the sun's true position.

This overhead diagram (which is not to scale) shows the position of Antares and the foreground rocks from the camera's orientation. The shadows (shown in black) are angled 45° away from Ed Mitchell's southeast-aiming camera, and they point in the same direction as all good shadows do. (One minor disclaimer: The shadows would be perfectly parallel if the ground were perfectly flat which it wasn't. The rocks' shadows appear to be following a slight downslope. Also, there seems to be a crater rim cutting into the LM's shadow and making it look a bit thinner and straighter.)

In pictures, parallel lines always converge toward a central vanishing point. Because of this perspective, the shadow of the distant Lunar Module will appear to diverge in a particular predictable direction similar to that seen in the next photograph.

The following street scene has plenty of parallel lines to show off the effect of perspective convergence. Road curbs, divider lines, and overhead wires all converge in the distance--and so do the shadows. (You can click on the picture for a larger version in a new window.)

This photograph was taken in the late afternoon, with the sun in the west and the shadows all pointing (nearly) due east. The camera was aimed northwest to give the same shadow illusion as seen in AS14-68-9486. Notice how the shadow of the lamp post across the street is virtually horizontal, while the shadows on the street's nearside all point downward at 45°.

Is that surprising? Parallel shadows must show the same parallel convergence as road curbs, so of course they must diverge, just as they did in the above picture, just as they did in AS14-68-9486. You surely didn't expect the shadows to look like this, did you?

In this crudely modified image, the lamp posts' shadows do indeed appear parallel, but in a real 3D world there is no way you could get a single natural light source to make shadows point together this way. Only an idiot would think different.

An idiot, and at least one of the co-authors of Dark Moon. For there on the bottom of page 23 is David Percy's illustration of how he thinks shadows should "naturally" behave:

"The light source in our composite is located far to the west [sic], and in our demonstration all the shadows are falling naturally due east" (Dark Moon, p. 22).

In other words, David Percy is saying the moon landings were faked because the shadows did not fall this way:

It's so ironic. If the shadows in all the Apollo lunar pictures did appear parallel, then NASA would have to answer some awkward questions because that would mean the shadows were not parallel and that there was some serious monkey business that would be obvious to everyone.

Everyone, that is, except perhaps David Percy.