It is a bit strange, everybody seems to have made up their mind already. There isn't much of a genuine, rational debate going. In particular, the Apollo believers can act quite defensively, to the point of name calling. Was it here, or where did I read that, as an Apollo sceptic, one was just the same as a holocaust denier, or flat-earther, or something? Most peculiar. Apollo believers sometimes appear to have invested a lot of emotional energy in the notion that the moon landings were the greatest human achievement ever. It's a bit like arguing over religion - a lost cause.
Anyway...
A.LeClair, you provided this link (thanks for that):
The Moon Hoax Debate
From the site:
"When Apollo 17's Lunar Module lifted-off the Moon the video camera followed the ascent, yet no one was left on the surface to operate the camera.
Apparently the hoax advocates have never heard of a remotely operated camera. The video camera that shot the LM launch footage was mounted on the Lunar Rover and was controlled remotely from Mission Control in Houston. The signal commanding the camera to pan upward was sent early to account for the 1.3-second time delay."
There is just about everything wrong with this type of debunking.
Where, exactly, is any kind of evidence for a remotely operated camera. Where is NASA's documentation, where is photographic evidence of its very existence. Who built the camera, who tested it.
How did NASA manage to anticipate the 1,3 seconds delay (both ways - uplink and downlink - making it closer to 3-4 seconds). Ok, so they knew the exact figure from doing the maths, and adjusted for it. Let's accept that for the sake of the argument. But how did they manage to artfully zoom in as well? I have heard the idea that the zoom was created after the event, on film only. Well, for a start, there is no evidence whatsoever that this might be true. Furthermore, when you look at the actual footage, there are no indicators that the resolution suffers from the zooming. Remember: We are looking at 1960s analogue technology. Compare the clarity of the Lunar Module take-off with the extreme blurriness of the rest of the Apollo video footage. Why so many inconsistencies?
However, the footage is totally consistent with what one would expect from a controlled studio environment.
