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Apollo Moon Landing Conspiracy Essay

Decent Essays

Every epic moment in modern history inevitably spawns a tangled web of conspiracy theories, and the Apollo moon landings are no exception. From the moment astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the lunar surface on July 21, 1969, some believed it was all an elaborate ruse staged by NASA on a Hollywood soundstage in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. (Of course, a different conspiracy camp believes man first landed on the moon a quarter-century before the Apollo astronauts when the Nazis established a top-secret lunar base where Adolf Hitler lived out his final years.)

Even the photographic evidence of the Apollo 11 astronauts on the moon has been seized by moon landing conspiracy theorists as proof of the hoax. In particular, they point to an iconic color photograph of Aldrin …show more content…

Only it wasn’t a studio light, but the man taking that photograph—Armstrong. “We found a clip of videotape that was shot from the other side of the ladder,” Daly said. “There is a huge glowing bright white light. And as we analyzed that video a little more we realized it’s Neil Armstrong himself. The bright white spacesuit that he was wearing reflected all that sunlight off of him and back onto Buzz Aldrin so essentially Neil Armstrong himself was a light source in that scene.”

While moon dust reflects about 12 percent of the sun’s light, the spacesuits worn by the Apollo astronauts were virtual mirrors constructed of materials that reflected 85 percent of the light that struck them, and Armstrong was bathed in full sunlight as he took Aldrin’s photograph. Once the Nvidia engineers adjusted for the reflectivity of Armstrong’s suit, the lighting in the virtual rendering nearly matched the actual photograph and proved that Aldrin could have appeared illuminated in the Eagle’s shadow with the sun as the sole lighting

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