Uktorah

Welcome!

Hello, Uktorah, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions, especially what you did for Moon landing conspiracy theories. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

• The five pillars of Wikipedia
• Tutorial
• How to edit a page and How to develop articles
• How to create your first article (using the Article Wizard if you wish)
• Manual of Style

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{help me}} before the question. Again, welcome! VQuakr (talk) 02:09, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

August 2012

Hello, I'm VQuakr. I noticed that you made a change to an article, Moon landing conspiracy theories, but you didn't provide a reliable source. I’ve removed it for now, but if you’d like to include a citation and re-add it, please do so! If you think I made a mistake, or if you have any questions, you can leave me a message on my talk page. Thanks, VQuakr (talk) 02:09, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

To reinforce this, you need to have a reliable source that makes the claim you're wanting to add. Using sources for raw data then taking conclusions from that without a source is called original research on Wikipedia and isn't allowed for articles. Please discuss this on the article's talk page before re-adding it. Ravensfire (talk) 02:32, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

Talkback

Hello, Uktorah. You have new messages at VQuakr's talk page.
Message added 02:33, 9 August 2012 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

VQuakr (talk) 02:33, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

Your recent edits to User talk:Ravensfire could give Wikipedia contributors the impression that you may consider legal or other "off-wiki" action against them, or against Wikipedia itself. Please note that making such threats on Wikipedia is strictly prohibited under Wikipedia's policies on legal threats and civility. Users who make such threats may be blocked. If you have a dispute with the content of any page on Wikipedia, please follow the proper channels for dispute resolution. Please be sure to comment on content not contributors, and where possible make specific suggestions for changes supported by reliable independent sources and focusing especially on verifiable errors of fact. Thank you. VQuakr (talk) 03:02, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

Your recent edits

Hello. In case you didn't know, when you add content to talk pages and Wikipedia pages that have open discussion, you should sign your posts by typing four tildes ( ~~~~ ) at the end of your comment. You could also click on the signature button or located above the edit window. This will automatically insert a signature with your username or IP address and the time you posted the comment. This information is useful because other editors will be able to tell who said what, and when they said it. Thank you. --SineBot (talk) 03:13, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

Your edits Moon landing conspiracy theories

Please be aware of the bright line three-revert rule, discussed at WP:3RR. I suggest you take this up for development on the article talk page before it is added to the article. There already is a Moongate snippet in the article, so it would be cleaner to merge the two sections if there is consensus that William Brian's theories need more attention. VQuakr (talk) 03:37, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

Moongate

Can you please scan the page of the book Moongate that deals with the issue of the neutral point and upload it (or send it to me)? Thank you. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 03:43, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

A technical point

Relative to your contributions to the Moon Hoax article, I think the issue you are seeing comes from the distinction between neutral point and sphere of influence. The neutral point, as you accurately describe, is the point between 2 bodies where the attractive forces (governed by inverse-square laws) are equal. I haven't done the math, but I believe this is the 9/10s figure you cite. However, this is only part of the story; this assumes that the bodies are not moving relative to each other--in reality, these forces are acting in a rotating reference frame, so some really weird/counterintuitive stuff starts to happen (like Lagrangian points)--you also need to take in to account the centripetal forces experienced by the third body (the Apollo capsule) in its orbit of the larger body (the earth) to get the full picture. This is where the sphere of influence comes in to play--this is where the influence of the smaller body is larger than the sum of both the gravitation from the larger body and the centripetal forces caused by orbiting the larger body. If you use this method, it turns out the Moon's sphere of influence is about 41,000 miles--exactly what NASA said it was! Mildly Mad^T_C 15:28, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

Actually, I think his misunderstanding is different. Reading through it, he thinks that surface gravity is the fundamental thing. It is not. Gravitational attraction is governed by Newton's law of universal gravitation. It is a function of the mass of the bodies and the distance between them. The surface gravity of the Moon is in accord with the law of gravitation. He is assuming that the distance to the neutral point should be proportional to the ratio of the surface gravity of the Moon and Earth, which is not true. If you consider the Earth and Moon fixed, you need to calculate a point where the gravitational attraction of the Earth in one direction is the same as that of the Moon in the other direction, using the law of gravitation. In the actual Earth-Moon rotating system, it is a little more complicated. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 16:39, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

I'm not so sure, I think he just left out a few steps. Here's his reasoning (and his error) better explained: The actual neutral point of the static Earth-Moon system is indeed 9/10 of the way from the center of the moon, or about 23,900 miles from the center of the moon. The NASA source he is citing states the point where the Moon's gravity "takes over"--mistakenly interpreted as "neutral point", but actually means "sphere of influence"--says it is around 40,000 miles. If you take the static neutral point as 40,000 miles and reverse the derivation, you get that the mass of the Moon is actually 1/25 that of earth (instead of the actual 1/81), which, radius of the moon staying the same, would increase the 1/6g surface gravity by a factor of 4 to 2/3g, as stated in his proposed edit. Note: I did some rounding on my calculations to make the numbers work out: 23,900/40,000 = 1/2, and 25/81 = 1/4. Mildly Mad^T_C 17:52, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

OK, maybe that is it. The Earth's effect on the surface gravity of the Moon is negligible. He concludes that the neutral point being where it is means that the Moon's surface gravity should be 4x what is actually is. But the surface gravity depends only on the mass of the body and the distance from it, or equivalently, its radius and average density. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 20:18, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

There also may be issues in distance from the surface instead of distance from the center, and maybe some distances are in statute miles and others are in nautical miles. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 20:19, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

And vice versa, the neutral point or sphere of influence doesn't affect the surface gravity. If the surface gravity of the Moon was much more than 1/6 that of Earth, the Lunar Module would not have been able to land and would not have been able to get back off. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 22:53, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

This is all true; surface gravity and sphere of influence have nothing (directly) to do with each other, except that they are both dependent on the mass of the Moon. But, as the proposed conspiracy goes, there is a contradiction between NASA's statement of the distance of the "neutral point" (which can be used to derive the mass of the moon) and the amount of surface gravity stated by NASA and shown in the footage of the landings (which can also be used to derive the mass of the moon). Therefore, OMG CONSPIRACY!!! As I stated above (albeit somewhat indirectly), if you correctly interpret the 40,000 miles figure as the "sphere of influence" instead of "static neutral point", this contradiction disappears. Mildly Mad^T_C 00:32, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

This is extremely relevant, from here:

Note 2) The Equigravisphere, or "sphere of influence", is the boundary where the spacecraft trajectory is considered to transition from earth-centered to moon-centered, which NASA defines as being 40,000 statute miles (64,374 kilometers) from the center of the Moon. This arbitrary definition is not to be confused with the commonly held definition of the equigravisphere being all points in space where Earth and lunar gravity are equal, the so-called "neutral point."

You are exactly right. And the 40,000 mile thing is an arbitrary definition. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 02:37, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

Also important is understanding why it is arbitrary: switching trajectories from Earth centered and perturbed by the moon to Moon centered and perturbed by the Earth is a smooth transition. Changing the altitude of the coordinate change does not introduce much error. VQuakr (talk) 03:17, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

And other possible factors are that the Moon is moving and the spacecraft orbit is curved. At the point when the Earth and Moon are literally pulling on it equally, the spacecraft is not directly between the Earth and Moon, and the Moon is not yet at the point where the spacecraft will reach it (and the distance from the spacecraft to the Moon plus the distance from it to Earth is larger than the distance from the Earth to the Moon). So there is never a time when the Earth is pulling it one way and the Moon is pulling on it with the same force in exactly opposite direction. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 03:29, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

Talk page stuff

Just a couple of notes on using talk pages that might help you out some in discussions. There are a couple of general conventions you'll see folks using here that can help make discussions a bit easier to follow since we're essentially just a page of text, not some sophisticated forum software. When you reply to someone's post, indent your post using colons. If you're the first person to reply, use one colon. If it's a reply to a reply (to a reply ...), use one more colon in your post than they did. This will cause your reply to be slightly more indented than theirs. At the end of your message, sign your comment by adding four tildes (~~~~). This will add a timestamp and your name automatically to your post, like you see at the end my comments. There's some more, but there are two easy ones that help you and everyone else better communicate. You can also read through WP:TALK which has some more info. Good luck! Ravensfire (talk) 17:16, 9 August 2012 (UTC)