chang-1

Keepin' it real fake: lunar evidence edition

Not content with just KIRF'n popular gadgets, our favorite reversers of engineering are back and this time, doing it up in space. Notice any difference between the 1994 Pentagon photo (on left) of the moon and that taken by China's Chang 1 last week in almost exactly the same location? Hint: look in the yellow circle. Right, what appears to be a new crater on the geologically dead hellscape we call the moon. Well, since the image was released under great fanfare in China, it's been heavily shouted down as a fake by flat-Earthers in the West. It's not, at least not in the traditional sense. According to Emily Lakdawalla of The Planetary Society, the image is real (and likely original) but the "new" crater is just an artifact from the process of stitching and blending 19 image strips taken on different orbits. The correctly stitched image (achieved by sliding the left-most crater up, and the right-most down) is presented in the yellow box above. Unfortunately, the chief scientist of the Chinese lunar exploration program, Ouyang Ziyuan, said that the emergence of the crater was proof that their photograph was original. Sorry Charlie, the crater is not new, only the lighting angle and resolution is... we think.[Via MSNBC]