![]() ![]() ![]() In later missions, astronauts didn’t fully extend the rod on purpose because they liked the effect. The Apollo 11 astronauts could not get the rod to extend completely, consequently the flag was not fully stretched out. In the second instance, the flag is not waving it just looks that way because of the way it was deployed. A flag wouldn’t wave in a vacuum, so it must have been an errant breeze on the set.Īnswer: A flag can wave in a vacuum. When the astronauts were assembling the American flag, it waved. Because the lunar landscape is brightly lit by the sun, the film exposure times had to be short-and stars do not produce enough light to show up during a quick exposure. “It has nothing to do with the sky being black or the lack of air, it’s just a matter of exposure time,” Plait explains. Without air, the sky is black, so where are the stars?Īnswer: The stars are there, but are too faint to be seen. Conspiracy theorists say this proves that the whole thing was staged somewhere in the Nevada desert. In the pictures taken by the Apollo astronauts from the surface of the moon, no stars are visible. Plait debunks moon landing hoax theories: The conspiracy theory about the moon landings has seen a resurgence, says Plait. All the questions put his talents to the test, he says, recalling an 8-year-old and his grandmother who tag-teamed him about black holes. For three years, he ran a nighttime lab for astronomy students, but his favorite experience was when the public was invited to peer through the telescopes at Observatory Hill and Fan Mountain. He says he got the teaching bug as a doctoral student at UVA. President of the James Randi Educational Foundation, Plait worked with the Hubble Space Telescope team at NASA in the 1990s and later did public outreach for other NASA-funded missions as a member of the astronomy and physics department at Sonoma State University. Plait neatly debunks it in his 2002 book, Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing “Hoax.” He continues to stamp out new outrageous theories, as they crop up, on his Web site. One of the worst instances of bad science, he says, is the claim that NASA faked the moon landings in the 1960s and 1970s. ranked it among the “25 Best Blogs” for 2009. His campaign to right the wrongs against astronomy began in 1998 with the launch of, a lively, humorous site to which he later added a blog. Phil Plait, known Webwide as "The Bad Astronomer," blogs to put a stop to bad science. The Luna-Lunacy Connection Ancient authorities like Aristotle, Paracelsus, and Pliny the Elder thought some humans were driven crazy by the full Moon. ![]()
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