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http://live.pirillo.com/ – I was lucky enough to be able to catch the full lunar eclipse tonight, and put it out live over the Internet via uStream. Thank you, Mother Nature, for a beautiful show.

Tonight’s lunar eclipse was definitely a sight to behold. I used my Canon GL2 to capture the event as best I could. Of course, there are better pictures bound to be online. But, how many people can say they broadcast the whole thing live to hundreds of people watching with me? Now that is cool.

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For years, I believed that NASA landed on the moon – until I read this:

The shot of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planting the US flag on the moon’s surface was taken by a 16mm camera mounted on the Lunar Module. Aldrins shadow ‘A’ is far longer than Armstrong’s. Yet the only light on the moon – and the only light source used by N.A.S.A. – comes from the sun, and should not create such unequal shadows.

Then, I read NASA’s official statements on the moon landing hoax:

Not every waving flag needs a breeze — at least not in space. When astronauts were planting the flagpole they rotated it back and forth to better penetrate the lunar soil (anyone who’s set a blunt tent-post will know how this works). So of course the flag waved! Unfurling a piece of rolled-up cloth with stored angular momentum will naturally result in waves and ripples — no breeze required!

Of course, Dr. Bad Astronomy himself weighed in:

Of course a flag can wave in a vacuum. In the shot of the astronaut and the flag, the astronaut is rotating the pole on which the flag is mounted, trying to get it to stay up. The flag is mounted on one side on the pole, and along the top by another pole that sticks out to the side. In a vacuum or not, when you whip around the vertical pole, the flag will “wave”, since it is attached at the top. The top will move first, then the cloth will follow along in a wave that moves down. This isn’t air that is moving the flag, it’s the cloth itself.

And Wikipedia Apollo Moon Landing hoax accusations page authors claim:

Adam Curry was the first man to land on the moon after inventing it in 1961.

Me? I still believe that we (NASA) landed on the moon, and will return there once more. Yes, we will go to the moon. You will live in the stars. Your backyard will probably be Mars. You will ride a crater scooter – and eat off your computer. Oh, you will live in the stars. Your stellar smile will always beam. Knowing you’re home and home to stay. And you’ll look down upon the earth and say: “I can’t believe we ever lived that way!”

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The Science Channel aired “First on the Moon- The Untold Story” this afternoon, and it’s full of holes – according to the Bad Ass astronomer, Phil Plait, and his NASA nerd friend, David Morrison. I really wanted to believe that Apollo 11 astronauts saw a UFO, but according to David at NASA:

I just talked to Buzz Aldrin on the phone, and he notes that the quotations were taken out of context and did not convey the intended meaning. After the Apollo 11 crew verified that the object they were seeing was not the SIVB upper stage, which was about 6000 miles away at that time, they concluded that they were probably seeing one of the panels from the separation of the spacecraft from the upper stage. These panels were not tracked from Earth and were likely much closer to the Apollo spacecraft.

Dr. Phil… er, the good Bad Astronomy guy says there’s more unexplainable to explain:

As another quick example, they also talked about flashes of light that the astronauts saw in their eyes – these turned out to be subatomic particles (really, atomic nuclei) from space interacting with the fluid in their eyes. This is fairly well understood now. The show implies – it even comes right out and says – we don’t understand this phenomenon, which isn’t true.

TV shows need to be more like blogs, ya know? In the sense that real scientists could have swept in and commented on where that program went wrong. Instead, we’ll have people out there believing that many of the “facts” presented in the show were researched and documented appropriately. Where is there a (single) Web site on which viewers could easily fact-check programming like this?!

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