Phil Plait, an astronomer and science writer, debunks astronomy myths and explains space topics for a general audience.
Commenters call Plait one of their favorite science writers and recommend his pages as expert takes on topics like the Apollo photos and starlight.
The author is Phil Plait, Bad Astronomer. He is writing for an audience that is not as technically well-informed as most of HN, so it’s no surprise to see his writing called out as “pedantic” by… a bunch of pedants! He’s helping people understand the world a bit better and that’s a great thing to do.
I recognized the style before I noticed his name. Phil was writing online as The Bad Astronomer at least as far back as 1999. I started reading his blog after it appeared on my WordPress “Blogs of the Day” ranking site in 2005.
http://www.badastronomy.com/info/whois.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20230922000000*/http://www.badastronomy.com:80/
https://web.archive.org/web/20051212173430/http://blogsoftheday.com:80/?list=topsites.html
>Another argument I heard against 3D movies is that apparently our brains use all sorts of cues (about 20, I think) other than differences between what the eyes see, in order to make us see things as 3D... 3D movies provide only one of those cues, and so naturally causes a strange feeling because the other 19 cues are missing.
A big one is atmospheric haze, which is easy to reproduce to be fair. It is also the reason for a lot of the perceived inconsistencies in apollo moon photography: http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.html#backgrounds
> This article brings about the exact same glee and nostalgia.
Phil Plait is one of my favourite science writers, and has been consistently putting out great "bad astronomy" blog posts for years (decades?). If you want more of his writing you can check out the website:
http://www.badastronomy.com/index.html
If you genuinely want an expert's take on these matters, this is a good place to go: http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.html
Specifically w.r.t. photos: http://www.iangoddard.com/moon01.htm
There's also a book: http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Astronomy-Misconceptions-Revealed-Astrology/dp/0471409766
Honestly I'm not sure, but based my comment off this page I read years ago:
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/badstarlight.html
It doesn't seem so unreasonable. I have also read the human eye can detect a single photon and 450 photons per cm³ is about 3e10 photons per second.
It seems that the moon does rotate: http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=142
At least to an observer sitting in a fixed point in outer space.
Edit: better explanation: http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/moon_spin.html