• Like many other Apollo photographs, Apollo 11 photograph AS11405872 shows strange blobs in the sky that should not have been there.
• The cross hairs on Apollo 16 photograph AS1610717446 go behind the objects, which proofs that it is a fake, pasted-together image.
• In Apollo 11 photograph AS11405942 Buzz Aldrin is carrying the EASEP experiments toward the deployment site. There is no antenna on top of his PLSS. In Apollo 11 photograph AS11405943, supposedly taken only a few seconds later, an antenna is clearly visible.
• Photographs and video footage of the American flag on the Moon shows it fluttering, although there is no atmosphere or wind on the Moon.
• On some video footage of the Apollo landings you can see right through the astronauts, like they're ghosts, which proves that the footage was faked.
• Some photographs have strange, smudged areas and lines on them, which prove that they were faked.
• Since the Moon has no atmosphere, there should be thousands of stars visible on the photographs, but there are no stars at all.
• Some of the photographs show the cross hairs at a strange angle, instead of straight as they should be, which proves that the photographs were tampered with.
• There was nobody to film the lander taking off from the Moon's surface, yet footage of it exists for all landings and it appears to have been done with models and wires. With Apollo 16 and 17 the camera even follows the ascent.
• The photographs taken on the Moon were taken by amateur photographers under allegedly very difficult conditions, yet they all came out perfect.
• Everything looks normal when you double the speed of the Apollo landing video footage, because it was simply filmed on Earth and slowed down to look like it was on the Moon.
• Neil Armstrong was the first man on the Moon, yet there is video footage of him descending the ladder and taking his initial steps on the lunar surface taken from outside the lander.
• The hills in the background of many of the photos keep reappearing in other photos, but with different foregrounds, which proves that the scenes are artificial backdrops.
• Two video clips that NASA claims were taken at different locations many miles apart show an identical hill.

The blobs are a very common camera effect called lens flare. It is caused by bright light shining into the lens and reflecting off its interior and then down onto the film. This isn't unusual and you'll be able to find it happening in lots of photographs, whether taken on the Moon or on Earth. On good scans of the originals these flares show up very clearly, whereas on images used on the Web, which are often third generation copies or worse, the flares are often washed out by contrast, making only the brightest spots show up as "strange blobs."

The cross hairs on Apollo 16 photograph AS1610717446 go behind the objects, which proofs that it is a fake, pasted-together image.

The Apollo cameras were fitted with a so-called Reseau plate. The Reseau plate was made of glass and was fitted to the back of the camera body, extremely close to the film plane. The plate was engraved with a number of crosses to form a grid. The intersections were 10 mm apart and accurately calibrated to a tolerance of 0.002 mm. Except for the larger central cross, each of the four arms on a cross was 1 mm long and 0.02 mm wide. The crosses are recorded on every exposed frame and provided a means of determining angular distances between objects in the field-of-view.

This crosshair overlapping phenomenon appears not only in this photograph, but in many Apollo photographs. Some clear examples are AS158711845, AS1713420491, and AS1714622296. In all instances the crosshairs disappear only when crossing a brightly lit white object, especially when the adjacent area is dark. What's happening here is that the intense light reflecting off the white surface is bleeding in around the crosshair and saturating the film, thus obliterating the crosshair. This is commonplace and is in no way evidence of fraud. It happens on photographs with crosshairs on Earth, too. Again, please note that on the high-resolution scans the bleeding is much more obvious.

In Apollo 11 photograph AS11405942 Buzz Aldrin is carrying the EASEP experiments toward the deployment site. There is no antenna on top of his PLSS. In Apollo 11 photograph AS11405943, supposedly taken only a few seconds later, an antenna is clearly visible.

Unlike the antennas on portable radios and automobiles, the VHF antennas on the astronauts' backpacks were not metal tubes, but flat metal strips painted white on one side and black on the other. The antennas were meant to be folded down when entering or leaving the lander. In a few of the later missions you can see astronauts with the antenna folded down because they have just emerged from the lander or are just about ready to enter it. When you look at these antennas edge-on (from the astronaut's front or back), they tend to disappear against the dark background. But when presented broadside (from the astronaut's side) to the camera they appear bright and prominent. In the second photograph Aldrin has turned slightly to the left and presented the broad face of the antenna.

The original photographs are both much richer in detail and you can actually see the antenna in both; in the first one as a thin line and in the second as a broad strip. This once again illustrates two important points about Apollo photographs available on the Internet. First is resolution. The images commonly available are scanned at a low resolution, at the cost of detail. Hoax advocates that complain about missing detail should work from prints or high-resolution scans. It also illustrates the lossy compression in JPG picture encoding. Even high-resolution JPGs can lose some detail when they are compressed.

Photographs and video footage of the American flag on the Moon shows it fluttering, although there is no atmosphere or wind on the Moon.

This is one of the most ridiculous observations. It is readily apparent that in all the video clips showing a fluttering flag an astronaut is grasping the flagpole and is obviously twisting the pole, which is making the flag move. In fact, in some clips the motion of the flag is unlike anything we would see on Earth. In an atmosphere the motion of the flag would quickly dampen out due to air resistance. In some of the Apollo clips we see the twisting motion of the pole resulting in a violent flapping motion in the flag with little dampening effect.

Many hoax advocates claim that even some of the Apollo photographs show a fluttering flag, which begs the question how one can see a flag flutter in a still image. Perhaps the ripples and wrinkles in the flags are being perceived as wave motion? The flags where attached vertically at the pole and horizontally from a rod across the top. On some flights the astronauts did not fully extend the horizontal rod, so the flags had ripples in them. There is much video footage in which these rippled flags can be seen and, in all cases, they are motionless.

On some video footage of the Apollo landings you can see right through the astronauts, like they're ghosts, which proves that the footage was faked.

This only happens in footage of the early flights and is a result of the primitive video technology used. What could happen if they were pointed at a bright stationary object is that the image of it could burn into the electronic receptors. It's a temporary effect, just like your eyes can still see a light bulb if you stare at it long enough and then turn away. It's also not dissimilar to what can happen to older computer monitors without a screensaver. What happened on the Apollo footage is that the image of the stationary lander in the background was burned onto the camera. So it remained on the screen over the top of the astronaut even as he walked in front of it.

You don't have to take NASA's word on this. Ask anyone who purchased one of the first video cameras on the market in the 1970s.

Some photographs have strange, smudged areas and lines on them, which prove that they were faked.

Most of these observations are based not on the actual photographs, but on scanned JPG images published on web sites. As discussed before, there's a trade-off with JPG compression. It uses a lossy compression algorithm, which means that the image loses detail. The higher the compression, the more detail is lost. Usually this doesn't matter as the detail lost is minor and the algorithm makes a good job of disguising it. But if you look really hard, or magnify bits, you're always going to see what appears to be smudging.

There is, however, also a set of Apollo photographs (AS1611618574-AS1611618664) that show actual smearing -- almost as if someone spilled something over them. This possible film damage is quite obvious, though, and is hard to mistake for tampering as the smearing is virtually identical on each photograph of that particular film.

Since the Moon has no atmosphere, there should be thousands of stars visible on the photographs, but there are no stars at all.

The Moon's surface is airless. On Earth, our thick atmosphere scatters sunlight, spreading it out over the whole sky. That's why the sky is bright during the day. Without sunlight, the air is dark at night, allowing us to see stars. On the Moon, the lack of air means that the sky is always dark. Even when the Sun is high off the horizon during full day, the sky near it will be black. If you were standing on the Moon, you would indeed see stars, even during the day. Yet to capture them on film is a different matter, because despite the dark sky during the lunar day there is still an enormous amount of reflective light to take into account.

In the harsh light of the sunlit lunar surface, very short exposure times were needed to keep the film from overexposing foreground objects -- like the surface and the astronauts themselves. As a result, faint, distant objects (like stars) are simply not visible in any of the photographs taken of foreground action on the Moon.

There are other pictures, taken by several unmanned Surveyor spacecraft from the lunar surface, that overwhelmingly demonstrate this underexposure. In order to get the stars even to show up for navigation and location purposes, the Surveyor cameras had to use (in one example) a three-minute time exposure to record them. In contrast, the average exposure time of the hand-held film photographs taken on the lunar surface by Apollo astronauts is about one 250th of a second, or an average of forty-five thousand times shorter than the exposure required to actually record stars in the airless lunar sky.

Some of the photographs show the cross hairs at a strange angle, instead of straight as they should be, which proves that the photographs were tampered with.

Some of the photographs have the Reseau-lines, or cross hairs, at odd angles because the photograph was originally taken with the camera squint. When the image was developed and printed for publication it was rotated to straight up and down, and then cropped to a tidy rectangle. A good example is Apollo 11 photograph AS11405903, which was rotated several degrees clockwise to make Buzz Aldrin stand up straight. Also, as you can see, in the original the topmost part of his backpack is cut off by the frame edge. On the press-released image several inches of black space has been added for balance.

There was nobody to film the lander taking off from the Moon's surface, yet footage of it exists for all landings and it appears to have been done with models and wires. With Apollo 16 and 17 the camera even follows the ascent.

This often shown footage was taken by a remotely controlled camera. This camera was initially mounted on the lander to film the astronauts leaving the lander. It would later be removed from the lander and, in earlier missions, mounted on a tripod (photographs AS11405907, AS12466756 -- which failed, and AS14669241). In later missions it was mounted on the Lunar Rover, which was left behind (AS158811901, AS1611718797, and AS1713420475). By the last two missions, Apollo 16 and 17, it was known exactly how fast the lander would ascend and how fast the camera had to pan up. It was set up in advance of the take off and triggered remotely from Earth.

The photographs taken on the Moon were taken by amateur photographers under allegedly very difficult conditions, yet they all came out perfect.

The astronauts received a great deal of training before they left Earth. Part of this was in the operation of the cameras, which were specially designed by Hasselblad to be used by the astronauts with their suits on. What many people do not know is that the Apollo astronauts took about 17,000 photographs on the lunar surface. So there are plenty of not-so-great photographs that NASA simply has never published -- over or underexposed, strange angles, accidental exposures, out of focus, extreme lens flares, etc. A few examples: AS11405901, AS11405904, AS11405965, AS11405966, AS12466735, AS12466806, AS1611718852, and AS1713420389. Those that the public are most familiar with are the best ones.

Everything looks normal when you double the speed of the Apollo landing video footage, because it was simply filmed on Earth and slowed down to look like it was on the Moon.

There's an easy explanation for this phenomenon. An object in free flight will follow a ballistic trajectory in accordance with Newton's laws of motion. The only force acting on the object is gravity, which on Earth has an acceleration of 32.2 ft/s2. On the Moon gravity is much less, 5.33 ft/s2. If the ballistic flight of an object on the Moon is sped up by a factor of 2.46 it will mimic exactly ballistic motion on Earth, and vice versa. The double speed the hoax advocates claim is close to this 2.46 ratio, hence free flight motion looks somewhat normal because it is what our eyes and brains are accustomed to seeing here on Earth. Other motion however, such as the movements of the astronauts' arms, looks very unnatural when speeded up. The hoax advocates deceivingly apply this explanation very selectively. If the Apollo footage is viewed in its entirety at double speed it becomes clear that this assumption cannot account for all observed motion.

The Apollo footage is exactly what it appears to be, that is, man on the Moon. The convincing evidence is in the dust, which is particularly apparent in the footage of the Lunar Rover. If this footage were shot on Earth there would be clouds of dust thrown into the atmosphere by the Rover's wheels; however, there is no evidence of this. The dust immediately falls back to the surface in a ballistic arc matching its airless and low gravity environment. The same applies for dust kicked up by the astronauts.

There also is footage that shows clumsiness and inadvertent falls by astronauts. For instance Apollo 15 (.mpg format), Apollo 16 (.mpg format), and Apollo 17 (Quicktime format, .mov), which, when played back at double speed, looks extremely unnatural. So playing with film speeds really doesn't prove anything other than that the footage is authentic at its normal speed.

Neil Armstrong was the first man on the Moon, yet there is video footage of him descending the ladder and taking his initial steps on the lunar surface taken from outside the lander.

There was a video camera mounted on and extended from the side of the landing module especially for this purpose. NASA anticipated that the moment that Armstrong stepped onto the Moon would be particularly significant and something everyone would want to see. As Armstrong started down the ladder he remotely deployed it, swinging it out from its storage position in the side of the module. Note how the left hand side of the video image is obscured by both the side of the lander and the arm of the storage compartment that lowered it (A11V1092338 in .mpg format). The way the camera was mounted meant that these first pictures were actually upside-down and had to be flipped over once received on Earth. The same camera was then removed and used to send video pictures of the rest of the lunar activities from a stand on the lunar surface. Here is a collaborating statement from Buzz Aldrin:

"As Neil backed out of the hatch, it was not that easy -- with the backpack on -- to clear the opening. So I had to guide him down: left, right and so on. Once he got on the 'porch,' as we called it, he pulled a lever, which brought the live television camera into view. But the image was upside down; Houston had to send the computer a signal to put it right-side up again."

The hills in the background of many of the photos keep reappearing in other photos, but with different foregrounds, which proves that the scenes are artificial backdrops.

What can often be seen in the background of the Apollo lunar photographs are not hills, but mountains. Very big mountains even compared to mountains on Earth. Lunar mountains tend to be big because there is nothing to wear them down, unlike on Earth. It is also very difficult to judge distances on the Moon. This is because there's no atmosphere to soften distant objects and the landscape is pretty featureless. Things that are very far away can appear to be quite close. Unless you know their relative size it can be hard to tell. This comes out very clearly in Apollo 16 video clip A16V1673855 (RealMedia format), where the boulder that appears to be about ten feet high and only a few yards away from the astronauts turns out to be as big as a house and quite a distance away.

Another example is the unassuming hill pictured in Apollo 15 photograph AS158711835, which is in fact Mount Hadley -- all 14,765 feet of it. That makes this hill over three times the height of the tallest mountain in the British Isles and bigger than any mountain in the US outside of Alaska. And Mount Hadley is by no means unusual in lunar terms. So many of the apparent hills are actually mountains, and they're far away. So the astronauts would have to travel a long distance before they'd ever stop being in the background. What Apollo photos taken from different points actually show is a slight variation in the angle you can see the mountains. This is called parallax and is often used on Earth to estimate distances from photographs. Parallax is very hard to fake and would be impossible with a backdrop. Rather than proving they're a fake background, the photographs prove they are three dimensional, large, distant objects.

Two video clips that NASA claims were taken at different locations many miles apart show an identical hill.

The video clips to which the hoax advocates refer are from a non-NASA documentary that accidentally used a wrong clip. This was a simple mistake, but not one made by NASA. According to NASA, the clips were actually taken about three minutes apart on the same hill.