If there is supposedly a diminutive ammount of air on the moon, why is the American flag blowing rapidly?

Question

i admit i pasted this from a facebook page...this is interesting though, isn't it?
And where are the stars in the pictures?

Answer 1

It's not waving. Everytime you see it moving, someone is fidling with it. The rest of the time, it's just standing straight out because there's a wire along the top of it.

Go outside at night, stand under a street light, and take a 1 sec exposure. Hey, you don't have stars in your pictures! The surface of the Moon is highly reflective - very bright. They took short exposures so as not to overexpose - just like you just did. You need a longer exposure to pick up faint objects, like stars.

Answer 2

1) There is no air on the Moon.
2) The flags that are on the Moon are not blowing rapidly (or slowly or at all).
3) When a camera is set for daylight pictures (as the conditions were on the Moon), you set the shutter for the inverse of the speed film, at f/16.
(e.g., if you use ASA 64, you set the shutter at 1/60 and the diaphragm at f/16 -- meaning the opening is 1/16 of the focal length of the lens)

At that opening, on Earth you will get the Moon and, maybe if you are lucky, Venus. No stars.

On the Moon, where the glare is a lot less, you might get stars brighter than magnitude 0 (there are about a half-dozen in total) IF they happen to be within the field of view (all 6 can never be in the same field of view). ANd there are occasional stars in the pictures.

However, the big news is that all these hoaxes that people still insist on posting all over the place have been proven to be false years ago. Most of us don't bother to explain any more.

I've made an exception in the remote case that you might be someone who had not known about this before.

Answer 3

I wish people who ask this question would tell me where they see the flag 'blowing rapidly', cos believe me it doesn't. Are you looking at a still image? If so, how do you deduce any movement? It's held out across the top by a pole precisely because it won't wave in a vacuum, and that would look a bit crap and not terribly likely to have your audience's chests swelling with nationalistic pride. Are you looking at TV footage? If so which bit? The only time the flag ever moves on the TV footage is when it is being, or has just been, moved by an astronaut.

And if there is indeed a wind blowing the flag, why is it not blowing around the dust that is kicked up by every single step the astronauts take?

As to the stars, they are not in the pictures because it is simply impossibly to correctly expose the daylit lunar surface and the stars as well. That is elementary photography. Go and look at any other picture or video taken in space and try to find stars in it. You won't, for precisely that reason.

Answer 4

Yes, I remember seeing the flag fall over just on the edge of the screen as the Eagle blasted off. But strangely every video I see now on DVD or on the web of the takeoff has that part missing. I guess somebody on high objects to what happened to the flag. However it is still there. It couldn't have been blasted off the moon because the blast was downwards away from the lunar lander. It was the lander that left the moon. However there are 5 other flags that were planted a safer distance away and are still standing.

Answer 5

The answers above show you how foolish you are and how people with little knowledge can be duped by all this pseudo-science that clutters the internet.

Using the absence of stars in the sky to try to show the pictures are fake is especially ignorant, as it is so basic to photography (and basic observation – the reason you see less stars from the city than from rural places) that it is a positive embarrassment for anyone to put this forward as some kind of “proof” the pictures were faked.

Do you enjoy showing your ignorance?

I wish people would get back some pride in what was achieved by Apollo in the late 60s/early 70s, rather than trying to denigrate such a fantastic human achievement with this nonsense.

Answer 6

All I ever remember seeing on TV decades ago was when the flag swung back and forth as a pendulum when the astronauts first set it up. That sort of motion doesn't require any wind -- just gravity.

And if you are being misled by the thing looking sort of 'wavy' as if it's flapping in the wind, that was caused by the astronaut accidentally bending the support wire at the top of the flag when he deployed it.

The only other time you could see the thing waving was when the ascent module's exhaust hit it. Didn't the astronauts admit that the exhaust blast actually knocked the thing over? Oops.

Answer 7

The stars are right there. (zoom in)
http://www.solarviews.com/raw/apo/as11_40_5874.jpg
They are faint but that´s because the picture was taken during daytime...
The flag isn´t blowing wildly. You can see clearly in this picture how the flag was constructed. It is not an ordinary flag. It has rods and weights in it. It only moves as someone is moving it or right after someone has moved it. It does not move, however, as the astronauts move right by it. It would if there was air.

Do a little research and stop letting facebook think for you.

Answer 8

Why do you people insist on believing that the whole Moon landing is a hoax and so on and so forth? Give it up and find something else interesting to do with your time. I am sure the next thing you will say is that the earth is flat because someone posted it on Facebook or whatever book is out there.

Answer 9

The flag is suspended from a top support to hold it out horizontally. The shutter-speed for that picture was too fast for the starlight to register.

Answer 10

If this is so interesting to you, you should to some research. You will so find out it is not something worth your while. Curiosity is good, a little further exploration is better.