Can you tell what’s wrong with this depiction of the Apollo-11 landing?
April 18th, 2010
|
| Share |
There’s a show on CBS and syndicated on TNT called “Cold Case.” I don’t generally watch it, but as I was flipping through the channels I happened to see the Apollo-11 landing and so I stopped briefly to view the segment, which turned out to be a depiction on the show “Cold Case.”
This is the opening sequence of the show, which in this episode is supposed to show a family watching the television broadcast back in 1969, but there’s a major error in the the sequence. Whichever editor put this together didn’t know or perhaps didn’t care.
Actually there is more than one major error in it. At least two glaring ones.
Can you tell what’s wrong here? And no, it’s not the footage being fake or being from another Apollo mission. That is real footage from Apollo-11.
This entry was posted on Sunday, April 18th, 2010 at 1:49 am and is filed under Good Science, History, Misc, Space. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
View blog reactions
April 18th, 2010 at 3:07 am
hmp. I’m thinking the audio is cut up and in the wrong order. They say the eagle has landed first and then Houston says “copy you down” and if I recall that’s followed by “We got a bunch of guys about to turn blue.”
Also, I think it’s condensed. So that’s my guess, that the audio is all missmashed and messed up.
Maybe the video is condensed too much too?
Quote Comment
April 18th, 2010 at 4:02 am
What about an ancient monochrome fish-bowl type television that suddenly creates a color image?
Quote Comment
April 18th, 2010 at 8:40 am
Assuming the scene of Cold Case was in the US, the landing/opening a the hatch took place at night (10:39PM EST), its daytime in this scene.
Quote Comment
April 18th, 2010 at 10:46 am
I’ll go with nick362 on this one, admitting he was the one who noticed it – I didn’t come to it independently
Quote Comment
April 18th, 2010 at 10:48 am
Oh and BTW LcNessie that was what color tvs looked like, you can tell by the knob count under the guard on the lower right-hand side.
Quote Comment
April 18th, 2010 at 11:05 am
As I recall they did not broadcast television from the moon until they had landed, and actually it was some time after that. It was after Armstrong started down the ladder that he opened the storage bay where the television camera was located and turned it on for the first pictures. The only live coverage of the landing itself was audio only.
That footage is probably from one of the movie cameras on the spacecraft, which would not be available until after the mission returned with the film.
Quote Comment
April 18th, 2010 at 12:08 pm
DV82XL said:
Aw nuts! I knew that that answer was too easy…
Quote Comment
April 18th, 2010 at 12:29 pm
Gordon got what I consider the most obvious glaring error. The landing itself was not televised. The TV camera was in the MESA outside the LM near the ladder. It was pointed at the ladder to capture the first steps. Also, in order for television to be transmitted the high gain s-band antenna had to be aimed. It was not until the EVA some time later that television was transmitted. Neil Armstrong had to drop the MESA down and Buzz Aldrin had to power on the television system and work the S-band system to broadcast the video to earth.
The video shown came from the Mauser Data Accusation Camera, a 16mm motion picture camera. That is the only camera that recorded the landing itself. Of course, this footage would not be viewable until after the film was returned to earth and developed.
Error number 2: Engineering Edgar got it. The audio is butchered. They didn’t even say “Houston, Tranquility Base, the Eagle has landed.” They only said “Tranquility Base, the Eagle has landed.” They cut it up with another time they said “Houston.” The sequence is wrong in that Houston did not say “copy you down” until after that statement
Error number 3: I didn’t even notice it, but nick362 pointed out that it’s completely the wrong time of day.
So correction: There are at least three glaring errors, not just two!
Quote Comment
April 18th, 2010 at 9:16 pm
How about right at the beginning where it says “The following story is fictional and does not depict any actual person or event.” I’m pretty sure the Apollo 11 moon-landing happened.
Quote Comment
April 18th, 2010 at 11:49 pm
drbuzz0 said:
The landing took place at 20:17:40 UT, which is 4:17:40 pm EDT or 1:17:40 PDT. So it was indeed daytime in the U.S. when the landing took place, but as others have already pointed out, the landing was not telecast live (perhaps to spare the American people from witnessing a tragedy in case something went wrong).
I agree with Stephen: the disclaimer is the worst mistake of all.. Maybe the editors beleive the landings were faked….
Quote Comment
April 19th, 2010 at 12:03 am
Stephen said:
Brian Garrett said:
That’s not what it means. This is just the intro of a television show about a fictional crime that occurred years ago and is solved more recently – hence the name “cold case.” In this episode someone watches the moon landing and then shortly afterward gets killed. The moon landing is just incidental to the plot.
Quote Comment
April 19th, 2010 at 12:23 am
I haven’t watched the clip yet, but I would like to remind you that we are talking about two separate objects here. When it is night time in North America, it will be “daytime” on the moon. That is, if the moon is full it is reflecting the suns light. The landing site would not be in shadow until daytime in NA.
Quote Comment
April 19th, 2010 at 1:44 am
Daniel said:
Hmm. Where to start…
You do realise that the moon is tide locked to the earth, don’t you?
Quote Comment
April 19th, 2010 at 2:52 am
The moon rotates around the earth in a 28 day cycle and the rotation is the same period as the orbit, so wouldn’t the moon have a 28 earth days to one lunar day?
Quote Comment
April 19th, 2010 at 4:53 am
Brian Garrett said:
So which method of specifying the time is being used here? 24 hour clock, 12 hour clock, or ambiguous clock? My brain automatically parsed without the ‘pm’, so it seemed that despite being 6 hours behind, EDT was simultaneously 8 hours ahead. Confused the hell out of me for a minute.
On a related note, is it logical to assume that the journey to the moon was timed specifically so that the landing would happen while it was early afternoon in the US?
I didn’t manage to spot any of the errors myself. I think that says a lot about how much attention I’ve paid to the moon landings and space travel (beyond acknowledging that it’s really really cool and wishing I could go myself before Starbucks set up a franchise).
Quote Comment
April 19th, 2010 at 7:33 am
drbuzz0, I think you mean data acquisition camera, not data accusation camera. I also think the last shot showing the LM shadow is actually a still, possibly AS11-39-5771, but I’m not sure.
Quote Comment
April 19th, 2010 at 8:12 am
Finrod said:
It was late, I was just referring to the comments about how they could not be in sunlight on the Moon if it was nighttime on Earth.
Quote Comment
April 20th, 2010 at 2:50 pm
Hey Steve, if you’re interrested in that kind of goof-finding, try to look up the CSI:Miami episode “Dead Woman Walking”. It’s season 1, episode 15. The case involves someone who has been injected with a radioactive substance that is killing her. See how many errors you can find.
Quote Comment
April 20th, 2010 at 3:14 pm
Michael Karnerfors said:
Better yet find the one or two instances they got it right. God, that episode pissed me off something critical.
Anyway the whole CSI universe operates under a different set of physical laws than ours does; you can tell by what goes on in the labs.
Quote Comment
April 20th, 2010 at 3:39 pm
DV82XL said:
I was watching it while having my laptop with me. It rendered 4 new goofs to IMDb.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0534787/goofs
The ones that are not the first not the last are mine.
Quote Comment
April 20th, 2010 at 6:52 pm
DV82XL said:
You actually watch CSI? Do you have some kind of masochistic fetish? I saw that show a couple of times (although not a complete episode ) and it was painful enough that I knew not to ever subject myself to that again.
Quote Comment
April 20th, 2010 at 7:08 pm
drbuzz0 said:
My son and I used to watch CSI Miami together to laugh at the misuses they put the lab equipment to, and the cheesy one-liners David Caruso would deliver, but that only lasted a few months. We tired of it pretty quickly, but I did see the episode Michael is talking about. We didn’t laugh at that one though, it was pathetic.
Quote Comment
April 20th, 2010 at 9:03 pm
Michael Karnerfors said:
As I understand that episode shows the woman walking around like she’s relatively okay but waiting to die from radiation poisoning. That’s not accurate. It’s an exaggeration of a real phenomena, but a huge exaggeration.
When a person receives an extreme dose of radiation they often become violently ill at first and then appear to improve and regain some apparent health but this is temporary, as tissue dies and toxins from cell death build up they again take a turn for thew worse.
However, it’s not like you would appear to be “okay” or be able to walk around. You might be able to walk a little, under great effort and with little stamina, but it’s not like you get all better.
The general profile of a fatal dose of radiation would be a week or two that is like this:
Sick -> Violently sick and completely incapacitated -> Less sick and moderately incapacitated -> Moderately sick and slightly improved -> Severely sick again ->Dead
It’s not
Sick -> All better -> All better -> All better -> Dead
It’s not nearly as dramatic as that. The fact that there is some appearance of improvement should not be confused with an appearance of even semi-normalcy.
But more on topic, this doesn’t even apply to someone who consumes radioactive material. In the case of internal exposure, it’s not like it’s one single dose that the body can begin to recover from. Once the radioisotope enters the body, it continues to progressively cause damage from that point on, so you’d only get worse
On top of that, a person who is exposed to a very high dose of radiation may have grim chances of long term survival, but it’s not like they should be given up on. There are measures that can be taken to give them at least a fighting chance of making it through and recovering. These include preventative antibiotics, dialysis, surgical control of internal bleeding, burn treatment, fluid therapy, blood transfusions and in extreme cases, bone marrow transplant.
In the case of someone who was exposed to something like iodine 131 you could give them a very good chance of survival if you could get most of it out of their body as soon as possible. Likely the thyroid would have to be removed (that’s where it collects, but it would have fried that organ pretty quickly). Fluid therapy and possibly chelation to try to flush out the system would be a big thing too.
Quote Comment
April 21st, 2010 at 10:04 am
Daniel said:
The comments were talking about sunlight coming through the windows when the television from the Moon came at night. Which is actually true; although it was daytime in America when Eagle landed, the sun had set by the time Armstrong and Aldrin stepped out and the live TV broadcast from the Moon actually started. Many people above a certain age remember being allowed to stay up late to watch the TV broadcast of mankind’s first steps on the Moon. (There is a reason why “one small step” is better known than “tranquility base, the Eagle has landed” — more people saw “one small step” broadcast live.)
So the butchered newscast, assembled from real clips but condensed for time and using material not televised live, is the problem with this one. But I expect it was used for establishing purposes rather than for accuracy, so I think they can be forgiven some degree of dramatic license. It’s nowhere near as bad as what Transformers did with that Mars probe (Beagle 2, except it looked like a MER, and was being controlled by NASA, in a set looking suspiciously like the MCC, and was being filmed by a nonexistant camera).
In case anybody wonders, it wasn’t noontime on the Moon either; it was midmorning, IIRC. Midday sun (i.e. a full moon) was not desired, partly because of heat and partly because short shadows would make it harder to see details. The light is better in morning and afternoon. All the Apollo landings targeted lunar midmorning or midafternoon for this reason. (And even the later missions, with multiple EVAs, could spend the whole surface time in that sort of light; days are very long on the Moon.)
Quote Comment
April 21st, 2010 at 2:26 pm
For those who are wondering what they did show during the landing, since there were no tv pictures, I’ve seen the coverage from ABC NBC and CBS and they all had their own style of “simulation” which showed either a cartoony LM doing what it was supposed to be doing or some kind of model. This cut back and forth with the commentators and such and occasionally mission control. They did, of course, have the audio.
Here is the CBS version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJv5_y2l5as
I found the ABC news one the goofiest, at least in retospect (you know, coming from an era of computer animation and such). It can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1AzFcsHS_w
It’s a little model on a disproportionately small moon with a flame coming out of the engine that looks like it was done with someone’s cigarette lighter.
The BBC, unfortunately, has lost most of their footage of the coverage of Apollo-11. There are only a few bits and pieces of recording known to exist.
Quote Comment
April 22nd, 2010 at 1:01 pm
Let me guess — the infamous BBC archive purge? Would’ve been around the right timeframe. That purge dumped quite a bit of stuff which wasn’t supposed to be dumped (like much of the first decade of Doctor Who, including the majority of Troughton’s tenure), so I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was the same purge that did it in.
Quote Comment
April 22nd, 2010 at 2:46 pm
Calli Arcale said:
Well it’s not entirely clear if the actual broadcast was taped and archived at all or if it was, whether it was purged later on. Some stories are that it was taped but those tapes were reused just days later.
What exists is fairly sparse. There were pre-recorded segments made of things like explanations of the spacesuits and other kinds of inserts like that. There are audio recordings of the broadcast but only an amateur home recording of about a minute and a half exists. It’s black and white and very poor quality.
In addition to my interest in skepticism and science, I’ve recently gotten very interested in archiving and media preservation. It’s really something that has not been appreciated in years past, but I believe it’s a very important thing for history. We should do what we can to preserve all the media we can. Of course historic events and recordings like the Zapruder film, the Hindeburg exploding, the films taken on the moon, but even amateur home movies that give a glimpse of every day life.
Historians draw a line at where writing and documentation started. This line marks the boundary between history and pre-history. Pre-history is only known by artifacts and inferences. History is known by actually having direct documentation and writing.
I believe that some day a similar line will be drawn marking the arrival of movies and television recordings. Prior to this we have only written accounts and perhaps paintings or sketches, but nothing direct – only the descriptions of humans who very well may impose their own agenda or bias. After this, we can see the events as they happened. We don’t have to rely on the memory or description of others, we can watch things as they were. I consider this to be just as significant a leap in terms of documentation.
IMHO, our film vaults are our Library of Alexandria.
Quote Comment
April 23rd, 2010 at 12:05 pm
nick362 said:
That was my first thought too – I remember staying up late to watch it.
But my family lived in New York; if that scene took place in California it could still have been daylight.
Quote Comment
April 27th, 2010 at 12:28 am
IS there really anyone left who actually buys into the story that the US went to the moon? Come on guys! It’s such an obvious fake and it’s been proven faked so many times. Its about time they just admit it. I can’t believe anyone actually is stupid enough to think that **** is real.
Quote Comment