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I think these fake photos are ones his friend offers up to him as evidence. It's not too hard to find "fake" images from NASA; they release a lot of composite

I think these fake photos are ones his friend offers up to him as evidence. It's not too hard to find "fake" images from NASA; they release a lot of composite images, false color, etc. Presented in the wrong way, or to somebody inclined to cynical skepticism, these can be construed as 'fake' and used to reinforce that cynical skepticism. An important question to keep in mind when playing this game: was the fake photograph ever a real fake photograph, or is it a fake fake photograph? Sometimes people deliberately construct fake photographs specifically to be debunked as fake, to bolster their claim of the whole thing being fake. e.g. I photoshop a picture of Mount Rushmore on the Moon, claim I got the photo from NASA and say "Look how obviously fake it is! NASA thinks we're utter fools." Except usually it's more subtle than that. They'll take a picture of a desert on earth, adjust the colors to make it look like Mars, then present both the original and the altered alongside each other, claiming the doctored image of an earth desert is purported to be real by NASA. If you can bait somebody into defending the faked image, you can debunk them easily since the whole thing was a setup.

daveslash 4y ago
Right. Agreed. To add to that... Many of the images that we get from NASA in general aren't event "photos", they're composite images, just as you said. For example, a lot of "color" images are composites of black and white images shot through blue,green,and red filters and then re-assembled on the ground. They're "true" in the sense that they're not deliberately falsifying things, but not they're not "true photos". Somewhere (can't find the source at the moment) I recall reading that some of the early lunar reconnaissance photos were purposefully made lower quality by NASA because the U.S. wanted to keep it a secret from the Soviet Union just how good our orbital photography had become. Just because it has some obvious and provable editing does not mean that it's a falsification.
- dylan604 4y ago
  >just as you said. I would hope someone with the username of MichaelCollins would be able to speak about NASA ;P

daveslash 4y ago

Right. Agreed. To add to that... Many of the images that we get from NASA in general aren't event "photos", they're composite images, just as you said. For example, a lot of "color" images are composites of black and white images shot through blue,green,and red filters and then re-assembled on the ground. They're "true" in the sense that they're not deliberately falsifying things, but not they're not "true photos". Somewhere (can't find the source at the moment) I recall reading that some of the early lunar reconnaissance photos were purposefully made lower quality by NASA because the U.S. wanted to keep it a secret from the Soviet Union just how good our orbital photography had become. Just because it has some obvious and provable editing does not mean that it's a falsification.

dylan604 4y ago
>just as you said. I would hope someone with the username of MichaelCollins would be able to speak about NASA ;P