Science Foe Paws

Or is that fox paws? How's that for philosophy?!

Anyway... this article explains how a bunch of too-much-time-on-their-hands Texas State University Astronomers used science and computers and other nonsense to figure out the EXACT date and time that Monet painted 'Etretat: Sunset'. Go ahead and look at the pic at the top of the article. I'll wait. Their findings? Monet painted it on February 5, 1883 at 4:53PM. All based on some letters he wrote explaining a trip to France around that time, and then using the exact position he must have painted from, combined with the angle of the sun... blah blah blah....

AND this is where I call BULLSHIT! What these astronomers found makes sense, and is scientifically sound for the date and time the painting WAS DEPICTING. BUT... astronomers, those who use their imaginations to create the possibilities of finding other life-sustainable planets, imagine dead planets once supporting life, hell maybe other life out in space, don't think even for a second that MAYBE a painter used his own imagination to craft an image taken from his own memory or imagination?

Well...fuck! This being the scientific truth of paintings now... I want to know the exact time AND place where Dali happened upon three clocks melting on the beach and decided to paint them! The alien from the movies was based on a Giger painting... but now science is telling me that monstrosity is real?! Must be! Cuz you know, couldn't have painted something from imagination! And don't even get me started on Picasso!

Note: I realize I blew this shit all out of proportion, but c'mon! It's a painting, and these people actually flew to France and walked around the beach with Monet's painting until they got the exact position he painted from! How the hell do they know he didn't paint it in his basement three years later? You know, he wakes up at 2AM cuz he has to piss, shuffles past the fridge, opens the door to grab some OJ and the fridge light blinking on reminds him of that sunset in France.... Exact moment, indeed! PFFT!!!

Yeah. I read this a couple days ago and thought almost the same thing, but with one big point you missed.

Monet was an Impressionist. He didn't paint what he saw, he painted what he believed or perceived. That right there should tell those who performed the study that the painting isn't exact. Taken from the wiki, Impressionists "portrayed overall visual effects instead of details" and included "movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles". With that in mind, it'd be pretty hard to believe that Monet was at the exact spot the researches thought he was on.

It's funny. Archaeologists won't date certain structures by their astrological alignment because that would make some things far older than what they are believed to be, but astronomers will use alignments to date when a painting is made. Pfft.

Dammit, is this where we're putting science stuff? Seems to me we have some other threads around about science, or conspiracies, or space, or what have you. Fuck it, time to use the old #science and #space tags. Remember people, we can use hash tags now!

So I thought of this the night I watched a SLOW SLOW SLOW harvest eclipse almost new moon. I just forgot to look it up until this evening. As a backstory, maybe 15 years ago I watched a special on, I believe, discovery. In it, they had many hard-working science types, and some Russian cosmonauts from the 1960s, explaining the facts that show we never went to the moon. That the entire thing was done on a sound stage. Not going to say if that documentary made me a believer or not, but it definitely made me question. I mean, COME ON!!! They accuse NASA of faking the photos because of the little crosshairs on the lens not being in the foreground of the pictures, and NASA admits they doctored the photos for magazine covers and TV. They get legal documentation forcing NASA to release the originals and suddenly "Whoops! We haven't looked at those originals in a really long time, and apparently the storage closet had a flood. Oh yeah, the negatives are ruined too. But hey! We'll try to get them professionally restored and get back to you when we do!" Ahem...anyway...

So this dude at work likes to get me ranting about deep thought stuff and one day I was slamming him with these 'facts' and he's not buying it. He's got an answer for everything cuz he's heard this argument before. Suddenly, in a pinch, I come up with my own point. 50-ish years plus one big internet, how come I NEVER see amateur astronomers with mondo backyard telescopes bragging and posting pictures of their telescopic images of the moon landing zone and the damn flag? I mean, you hear all the time about these people who are just really into that stuff getting those telescopes that are like 5 feet long and 2 feet wide, with a tripod and a motor to turn them... hell, some of them can be plugged into a computer and they have software for searching coordinates in space! Not a one can show me the flag? I mean, I can make out some mountains and craters with a decent pair of binoculars! I'm calling bullshit. AND...my coworker? Maybe the landing happened too close to the edge of the dark side, and we can't see it from here! Convenient...

So this evening, I google imaged 'telescope images of moon landing site' and set the search size to LARGE. Go ahead, try it. I'll wait. Know what? Here's a LINK See the black dot that is supposed to be the LRV resting spot? Yep, pretty obvious that's exactly what it is. Ooh, dark lines! Must be tracks, cuz there's no way those lines are natural. HEY! There's the lander! You know, that big bright... ROCK looking thing! NOPE, not a rock. That's definitely the lander! Sorry, but those images are not the proof I'm looking for. Seriously, that's all the closer we can see?

Something is horseshit on the moon, and I don't know what it is. Did we land there? Are the Russians wrong? Would our government pay shitloads of tax dollars to fake beat the Russians during a high point of the cold war? There's GOT to be some science that can prove this one way or the other!

How about this? While thinking about this moon thing and looking at pictures, I ask myself what about amateur telescope images of the International Space Station? Granted, from a stationary location here, that's gotta be flying pretty fast, but can we get a quick snapshot to prove we actually have people up there? What if the ISS is just a big movie set in a hangar somewhere? What if we've never actually sent anyone into space? Why did we suddenly stop hearing about those Virgin Galactic space planes?

I've always been mixed about the moon landing. It does look fake, and everything I've read or seen in the conspiracy stuff makes sense to me, but... if we didn't go to the moon, then how is it we have images of the dome, the shard, the castle, Armstrong's comment about saucers along the crater's edge, and so on? Sure, many of these images could have been taken by probes, but it doesn't explain the UFO comment.

On a side note, I know of the program you are talking about though; it made mention of radiation, that the capsules were not thick enough to withstand cosmic radiation.

Regarding the moon landing conspiracy itself, with the different shadow directions, the foot print, the flag waving, and the movement of the astronauts, Mythbusters did a really good job of clearing this up. Then again, having a TV show demonstrate how and why the moon landing was real, kind of defeats the purpose. If a couple of effects specialists are able to recreate the moon landing to prove it is true, doesn't that means scientists were able to do the same thing in the first place?