The Bad Astronomer

Other favorites of mine include the legend that you can only balance an egg on its end during the vernal equinox (where the heck did that one come from?). Phil has pictures of himself in his Bad Astronomy Book balancing eggs on astronomically unimportant days. There's also a movie and TV review section, which allows for a perusal of all your favorite sci-fi shows to find out what's wrong with their science. I, for one, am sure that all the scientists in the world will never convince people that explosions don't make any sound in space. It's a lost cause

On the serious side, Phil's website is the only place I've been able to find a point-by-point rebuttal to the strange notion that NASA faked the Moon landings. A few years ago, when Fox came out with its special, "Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land On the Moon?'', I started to get questions from the public about whether the Moon landings had been faked. At first, I just sort of stared blankly at the person asking the question, unsure how to proceed. Did we fake the Moon landings? Uh, no. But admittedly, I had no good replies to the accusations the conspiracy buffs were making, and I hate feeling stupid. Phil goes down each of the points in clarity and detail.

Some of the pro-conspiracy arguments are just plain ludicrous: why can't you see any stars in the photos the astronauts took from the Moon, even though the sky was completely black? Really for the same reason that you can't see stars when you take a picture of someone at night, and use a flash. It's a matter of exposure time. Yes, the airless sky on the Moon is black even in the daytime, and if you were standing there, you'd be able to see stars. But when you're taking a picture of your fellow astronaut in the bright, hard sunshine, you need to set your exposure time low enough for the picture not to be totally whited out. That's too short of an exposure to pick up the faint, but present, stars in the sky.

Why does the flag that the astronauts deployed on the Moon look like it's waving, when there's no air to wave in? The flags the astronauts used were hung from a horizontal rod that telescoped out from the vertical flagpole. During Apollo 11, the astronauts couldn't get the horizontal support rod to extend completely, so the flag looked a little rippled. During the later landings, the astronauts found they liked this "flag waving" effect, and didn't deploy the rod to its full extent on purpose (Phil found that last part in a NASA spaceflight website, but that probably won't do much to convince the conspiracy fans).

But some of the other faked-moon-landing claims are a bit more harmful, as they purport to use science to "prove" the existence of this conspiracy. Not surprisingly, they don't bother to actually do any of the calculations, or find out how the science really worked. And that just makes me mad.

Take the argument that there should have been a blast crater left by the retrorockets that the astronauts used to land on the Moon. There didn't seem to be one in the pictures of the lunar modules on the surface of the Moon -a detail that NASA obviously forgot to fake. Remember that the Moon's gravity is only one sixth that of Earth's, so in fact, it doesn't take all that much thrust to slow down your descent. In actuality, the astronauts used about 3000 pounds of thrust to land the lunar module. The rocket's nozzle was about 54 inches across, or about 2300 square inches in area. Divide the thrust by the area, and you've got about 1.3 pounds per square inch, hardly enough to carve out a blast crater.

I could go on, but I think you'll have more fun exploring Phil's site on your own. He's also recently put out a book that has many highlights from the website, plus a lot more. It's called "Bad Astronomy," and it's available from any number of on-line booksellers. Phil fights the good fight against foes ranging from simple ignorance, to deliberate deception. And that makes him a very good astronomer indeed.

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