![](img/as11-ald-alsep1.jpg)
NASA: AS11-40-5942
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![](img/as11-ald-alsep2.jpg)
NASA: AS11-40-5943
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In the left picture,
Buzz Aldrin is carrying the EASEP experiments toward the deployment
site. There is no antenna on top of his PLSS. But in the right
picture, supposedly taken only a few seconds later, his antenna is
clearly visible. This discrepancy can't have occurred if the photos
were taken only a few seconds apart.
![](img/as11-aldrin-ant.jpg)
NASA: AS11-40-5942. ANNOTATIONS AND IMAGE PROCESSING
BY CLAVIUS
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If you enlarge a high-quality print of this image and enhance the
contrast as at right, you can see the antenna faintly indicated by the
yellow arrow.
Unlike the antennas on portable radios and automobiles, the VHF
antennas on the astronauts' backpacks were not metal tubes, but flat
metal strips painted white on one side and black on the other. And so
when they are seen edge-on (i.e., from the astronaut's front or back),
they tend to disappear against the dark background. But when
presented broadside (i.e., from the astronaut's side) to the camera
they appear bright and prominent.
The antennas are meant to be folded down when entering or leaving
the LM. In a few of the later missions you can see astronauts with
the antenna folded down because they have just emerged from the LM or
are just about ready to enter it. The other astronaut must fold down
the antenna.
This illustrates two important points about Apollo photographs,
especially those available on the Internet. First is resolution. The
images commonly available are scanned at a low resolution so that the
resulting file will transfer faster over the network. The price for
this speed is the loss of detail. Conspiracists that complain about
missing detail should work from prints, or at least from
high-resolution scans.
It also illustrates the lossy compression in JPEG picture
encoding. Even high-resolution JPEGs can lose some detail when they
are compressed to save file space. Even if the thin edge of the
antenna had been originally visible in the digital image above, it's
likely that JPEG encoding would have gobbled up that detail.
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