Active Silicon debunks moon landing conspiracies

The world has been awash with rumours and elaborate conspiracy theories about the Apollo 11 lunar landing since Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first walked on the the moon some 50 years ago. With half a century of attempts to disprove what many consider to be one of humankind's greatest achievements, Active Silicon, a specialist manufacturer of imaging products and embedded vision systems, has taken a look at three leading arguments in relation to moon landing photos.

A shady picture

Many people have pointed to the fact that some of the shadows cast by the astronauts are not parallel. Common sense would tell us to expect parallel shadows to be created in an environment with only one light source – the sun. 

Active Silicon said: "In reality, the uneven surface of the moon captured in a 2D image played havoc with perspective, creating what appears to be misaligned shadows. This is a condition which can be easily recreated with a single light source and is not proof of a lunar hoax."

Why can’t you see the stars?

Doubters have questioned the absence of a starry sky in the 1969 photos, but this can be explained with some basic knowledge of photographic techniques, Active Silicon argues.

"With the intense sun reflecting off the pale moon surface, the subject of any pictures taken by the astronauts would always be in a bright environment. Therefore, a small aperture and fast shutter time were selected to obtain the best quality close-up images. With this short exposure time, the starry background would not have been bright enough to be captured in any photograph," the company said in response to the starless sky argument.

It was all filmed in a studio

A common theory about the moon landing is that it was staged in a studio environment. Some theorists have even implicated director Stanley Kubrick as being the man at the helm.

"Not according to an interesting article by University of Hertfordshire’s Howard Berry. He explains in detail how the filmmaking technology of the era just wasn’t capable of producing the 143-minute-long 10 fps footage which the astronauts recorded," said Active Silicon. 

"While it’s fun to imagine ways in which we could fake a moon landing, all the evidence suggests that NASA didn’t in this case! And we were amused to see Buzz Aldrin deal with one of these conspiracy theorists a couple of years ago."

Active Silicon support space exploration

Active Silicon frame grabbers have been used in space research. In 2007, the company designed the cPCI 6U LFG frame grabber specifically for DARPA’s Orbital Express space mission. MDA Corporation commissioned it to develop a space qualified version of the LFG board to digitise images from the robotic arm mounted camera.

Active Silicon hardware can be found in the Thai National Observatory, the National Solar Observatory in New Mexico, and has even made it to the edge of the atmosphere aboard a NASA scientific balloon.

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