Moon hoax spurs crusade against bad
astronomy

CNN - January 11, 2001 Web posted at: 10:26 AM EST (1526 GMT)

SAN DIEGO (Reuters) -- The myth about equinox eggs got him started, misinformation about meteors bugged him, but when he learned that some people think the Apollo Moon landings never happened, Philip Plait knew the time had come for his crusade against bad astronomy. 
So what began as a frustrated astronomy graduate student's online fuming has evolved into a newspaper column, a book contract and a Web site that gets an average of 15,000 hits a week: http:/www.badastronomy.com  No one is spared on the site: Plait, who holds a doctorate in astronomy from the University of Virginia and worked with the Hubble Space Telescope, takes aim at movies, television, the news media and the Internet when they trample on what he considers to be the obvious truths about space science. 

Take, for example, the notion that humans never walked on the Moon, despite copious evidence to the contrary.  "People believe in the weirdest stuff, but they don't believe the most flaming obvious thing that's right in front of their face and I get e-mail about this," Plait said in an interview at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in San Diego. 
He blames much of it on the movie "Capricorn One," a science fiction offering in which a planned human mission to Mars is faked. "It's a good flick, but it legitimized a lot of these people who claimed we never
went to the Moon," Plait said. "There weren't that many people, but with the Web, you can spread disinformation instantly. People are just willing to grab onto this stuff."  Where are the stars?

The common argument used by the anti-Apollo folks is that in photographs of astronauts on the lunar surface, no stars can be seen in the dark sky, therefore the pictures must have been taken on Earth somewhere. 

Plait literally gagged as he recounted this, and countered with what to him was the obvious fact: there are no stars in the pictures from the moon because the Moon itself is being blasted with sunlight and is enormously bright, so bright that people on Earth can sometimes read by the light of the full Moon. 

"When they're taking a picture of this brightly lit astronaut on a brightly lit landscape, it's just like taking a picture in daytime here on the earth," he said. "No stars have a prayer of getting through that." 

Rather that debunking this idea on his Web site, Plait has a section referring visitors to other sites of "debunkers" and "conspiracy theories." But he plans a chapter in an upcoming book to be called "Bad Astronomy" on this question.  There will also be a chapter on those who calculate the birth of the universe
using the Bible, estimating its age in the thousands of years, instead of the billions of years that astronomers have long maintained.  'The accessible science' "Astronomy is one of the most accessible sciences," he said. "Everybody wonders about it and it does tap into the fundamental questions of humanity --
why are we here, what's our place in the universe, does the universe have an end, how did it start -- these aren't little questions, whole religions, trillion-dollar-a-year industries are based on these questions. 

"But it means that there's an open door into people's heads. If you can use that pathway to get to people, it's a good way to do it, for ill or for good," Plait said. Beginning in his student days in 1993 and 1994 with a personal Web site as his platform, Plait expressed irritation at a commonly held belief: that eggs can only
be stood on end at the exact moment of vernal equinox. That, said Plait, is just plain nonsense. And he said so on his site, eventually featuring a picture of a gaggle of eggs at attention, taken on October 25 -- as he
said, about as far from the vernal equinox as possible. He did not hit on the idea of creating a Web site about bad astronomy until 1998, several months before a Leonid meteor shower. It turned out to be good
timing: there was plenty of media grist for his mill in that event. Plait has not quit his day job: he currently works in California on public education programs for the Gamma Ray Large Area Space Telescope. He also
writes a column for the German newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.