Big Brother

1984 has been here awhile now however the quality of the pictures are not as sharp as you have been led to believe.  Have you ever looked at CCTV camera footage?  I have once when I was in my teens doing jury service which was played on DAT tapes and quite recently.  The level of quality has not perceptively improved by much which makes no sense whatsoever considering the mega-pixels I get on my phone and yet CCTV footage is still truly abysmal.

I have watched lots of CSI/Crime shows where the forensic bods take CCTV footage of a car and immediately resolve its number plate by applying a special filter, that's pure fiction no facts whatsoever.  If you start off with big pixels and poor resolution no amount of fancy imaging techniques is going to help you just end up with bigger pixels.

Recently in the news there was a report about a NASA astronaut covering up an potential UFO on the ISS Webcam feed, where the quality close-up is pretty good indeed.  That being said the so called evidence the SecureTeam10 shows is somewhat lacking not to mention the pure coincidence of the Astronaut's hand being suddenly in the way.  The evidence lasts 4 seconds on the camera and they have to slow it considerably just to spot it which means the astronaut would have been unlikely to see anything in that short space of time especially since I am sure he was too busy doing his work.

I will be the first to admit I am not a astrophysicist however looking at the evidence I would say either it was a meteoroid which hit the atmosphere and bounced off or it was most likely an artifact within the camera itself remember no gravity even a little bit of dust inside the camera's innards can cause all sorts weird effects.  Although I admit the way it fell looked more like space junk to me.

On thing Conspiracy theorists love to do is look at old photos of the Moon landings either to say they are faked or to point at some vastly distance object and say its not naturally occurring because it is curved or looks too straight. Curves occur all the time in nature just look at spiral galaxies.

Wikipedia has an excellent page about Apollo photos, which is well worth a read.  The cameras back them used film and over the course of the Apollo missions they took thousands of photos a lot of which ended up on the cutting room floor because of poor quality, incorrect exposures etc.  The astronauts had been trained to use the electric Hasselblad cameras  however even with this training it takes time to get perfect shots or take an awful lot and get lucky.  To which I can testify, in the summer of 1993 I spent five weeks camping on Canada traveled roughly five thousand miles in a beat up Ford Explorer (1969) with two friends who were both competent photographers.  Myself however not so much, I took over six hundred photographs of which I whittled down to one hundred fifty of reasonable quality and this is with a point and click camera.  The picture below was taken quickly and I did not notice that the 'P' sign sat nicely on top of the 'arking' sign.  One of my friends returned a year later to take the same picture on purpose.

Which goes to show the more the pictures you take increases the likely hood of some quality shots.

Whilst camera quality has improved over the last fifty years it is still far from perfect, distance shots require big lens otherwise you end up with big pixels.  You cannot hold Apollo photos to same standard of photographs today that is just basically idiotic.