The Lunascan Project
Status Report No. 1
 |
An Overview Of A Current Lunar
Research Project |
by Francis Ridge
abstract
| The Lunascan Project began in August of 1995
as a lunar imaging effort, to bring a fresh new approach to lunar imaging
in general and to search for possible evidence of ETI. The technique used
to image the moon was conceived in the late 70's and also involved the
discovery of objects between the Earth and the moon, referred to by the
author as "fastwalkers". After 15 years of pondering a revolutionary system
made available by video technology, the author set out to study and document
these objects, and to investigate the claims of several authors.
With the sudden upsurge in interest in computer email and the internet,
the Project's purpose and scope took an unexpected turn. And within a year
The Lunascan Project logged its first mystery, ULO-092196. |
My interest in the moon began in the 50's as a
teenager. I was never satisfied with simple optical observations, however.
I always had this vision of a control room searching for evidence of ETI,
but not with radio signals. My parents, brother and two sisters lived in
the country back then, and the evening skies were exceptionally clear.
The skywatches involved several neighbors, so the interest was more than
just my own. I had a small telescope, but what I did with it was surprising.
We had a coal bin that was next to the house and underground. It had a
man-hole-type cover so that the coal in the winter could be fed in by conveyor.
In the spring and summer I moved the remaining coal out and used the empty
8'x8' concrete block room for an "observatory". By sticking the scope out
of the "man-hole" during the day and closing up the light space around
it, I was able to make a "dark room" and the scope projected a very large
image of the sun, using a microscope tilt mirror, right on the west wall.
Everyone was amazed at the giant yellow star (the sun) with the beautiful
blue sky all around it, with all the detailed sunspots (umbra and penumbra).
As a young man I met a scientist, a person who
had worked on Project Sign, the original Air Force UFO project. Before
long I got involved in UFO investigation. By November of 1960 this man's
scientific credentials had made it possible for me to set up a rapid response
team for the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. I later
served with MUFON when NICAP shut down (circa 1971) and was MUFON State
Director up until the time I set up The Lunascan Project in August of 1995.
My interest in SETI took me 35 years from that November of 1960 before
I seemed to make any kind of progress. I investigated hundreds of sightings
and had over 4,000 incidents in the six state region researched and catalogued
on computer. In 1994 I released my book, "Regional Encounters: The FC Files"
to make sure my life's work didn't fade after my eventual demise. The big
change had began with the advent of the computer in the mid-80's, but really
took off when I got "online" in 1996.
The VCR
Fifteen years before Lunascan was the late 70's and
the age of the videotape recorder and the video camera. My first VHS recorder
was $1500 and weighed about 75 pounds. I was too financially challenged
at the time to buy a good color video camera, but found a used black &
white surveillance camera at a Radio Shack for $75. It had been used for
surveillance and I was to use it for home and family recordings, but soon
after that my imagination took over and the temptation was too great. If
you could see the moon through a telescopic eyepiece, why couldn't you
put the camera's eye up to that same eyepiece and see the moon on a television
monitor? It worked. I didn't have the time, funds, or patience in the late
70's to build the necessary camera mounts, etc., but I had "filmed" some
strange objects streaking above the lunar surface. Some were birds; others
were not. The videotapes produced very poor playback images and none survived.
For fifteen years a vision haunted me, a vision of a better telescope,
adequate mounts for cameras, and some way to control them from inside a
control room of sorts. One night I dreamed about taping the moon and seeing
something like the obelisks from "2001" floating in space . If ET existed,
and I was as convinced then as much as I am now, there was always the possibility
of catching them with their ET pants down, and I would have the evidence,
maybe even the proof. But the timing was wrong. In 1995 this all changed.
I wanted out of the UFO "business" and wanted to enjoy astronomy, especially
my dreams about scanning the moon. I resigned from MUFON, but stayed on
as a special investigator for the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies,
and had all the time in the world. I was an independent contractor and
did PR work out of my home for Mid-Tech. I still didn't have the kind of
money needed to mount such an ambitious moon scanning project, but the
ideas began to mount and the doors started to open. And I was dragged,
screaming and kicking, into the internet and email.
Several attempts to create a telescopic camera
system in late summer of 1995 caused me to search the catalogs for a better,
more reliable system. By late August I had ordered a gigantic "light bucket",
the "monster"
Meade 16" f/4.5 with an 1830 mm f/l. I
now had two years of $55 payments and the old original b&w Panasonic
WV-450 camera, and no way to mount it. I decided to set up a full-time
project with a play on the outdated term . "TLP", which stood for "Transient
Lunar Phenomena". The new term had been replaced by "LTP" ("Lunar Transient
Phenomena), but the project would be called "The Lunascan Project." The
project would be worth the effort if nothing ever happened other than improved
imaging of the lunar surface using state of the art technology. The definition
of an LTP, of course, is a short lived phenomenon observed on the Moon.
This can consist of red glows, flashes, obscuration, and abnormal albedo
and shadow effects. This didn't mean evidence of ET, but a possible ET
presence (past or present) could manifest in that way. Scientifically speaking,
LTPs were a legitimate topic for a comprehensive study.
Later on in the project, the entire July 1968
NASA Technical Report, R-277, of over 1500 reported LTP events would be
linked from our web site. See also Top
Thirty Regions of LTP Activity . A copy
of R-277 is hosted on MUFOR's web page by J.J.
Mercieca. But there was more than LTPs. There were reports of Extra-Lunar
Objects (ELOs), objects near (but not on) the moon. There were "fastwalkers",
objects moving rapidly across the field of view and apparently near the
moon. Other strange and anomalous features were found in NASA images, for
example. And more recently many scanning teams had filmed meteorite impacts
on the moon, something I had always predicted based on the fact that meteorites
still strike the Earth and the moon has no protective atmospheric blanket.
One of the goals of the project was even more ambitious. We needed to go
back to the moon, and soon we found several reasons for going there that
the public would probably support. For definitions and reports, go to our
web site page at LTPs
With internet email and the new Lunascan Email
List of over 200 members, the interest in the project flourished and the
funds started rolling in. Not a whole lot in terms of other SETI research,
by any means, but $3,000 got us the telescope, several 400-line CCD cameras,
T-C adapter mounts, and a DOB Driver II computerized telescope control
system. We were now able to control the scope (which later became a double
scope system) from down in the control
room room and watch the moon live on a TV monitors
as well as tape the sessions for later processing. In a short time we were
able to purchase a WWV receiver for audio time dubbing (Coordinated Universal
Time signal from Fort Collins, Colorado) and a TG-105 time date generator
for on-screen video time/date dubbing. In this manner we were able to document
any image we obtained. Later we purchased a Snappy frame grabber and were
donated two Aperture Video Correction Devices so that we could process
the images from high quality recorded VHS tapes. By the end of the
year I was really into serious lunar research and was really enjoying it.
Database
Early in the project I had started a database on
NASA images of the moon to help us locate specific items. There were the
images from Ranger, Orbiter, Surveyor, Apollo, and Clementine. Many of
these great images gave no clue as to where the features were exactly located
on the Moon. And how many people knew where the six Apollo landings took
place? Or where all the Surveyor spacecraft touched down? There were
many great telescopic lunar photos on the internet that cried out for a
single place to catalog their presence. For the latter images I created
the acronym, "EBTI", to represent "Earth-Based Telescopic Images". For
my own use I termed any photo that exhibited the entire moon as an "LPS"
image, meaning "Low Power Scanning". "MPS stood for "Medium Power Scanning"
and represented any image that contained only part of the moon, but still
not considered "HPS", or "High Powered Scanning". HPS was considered to
be over 300 power.
A Web Site
The need for a localized "bulletin board" and filing
system for our work resulted in the Lunascan Project web site. It was sponsored
several times by different individuals, but the drawback was in the reaction
time between a submission and the actual posting, plus corrections. Originally
the site was very simple, but soon the Lunascan Project. had a new goal,
a web page to educate the public about the Moon. By the summer of 1997
I had mastered the art of web-page making and had set up the site pretty
much as it is today. The new
site was launched on September 14,1997. The best
part of the site, in my opinion, was and is, the nearside directory.
I've always had a great interest in filing information and I selected the
76 Antonin Rukl sections as file directories for all the nearside data.
Although imaging the moon was the main mission in the beginning, the filing
of image links and reports into the 76 directories became the most useful
part of the Lunascan Project. To facilitate the search for browsers
I created a nearside click-on directory showing the divisions or Rukl
sections. After going to this page and clicking
on Section 64 (for example) one finds
Tycho,
which is Sectiom 64. This directory has a brief
description of the area it represents, links to the best EBTI (Earth Based
Telescopic Images) on the internet and BY the Lunascan Project that involve
targets from that region, all the available Ranger, Orbiter, Surveyor,
and Apollo images of the lunar surface for that region, plus all the appropriate
research updates or reports, 14 at last count. I created all 76 directories,
then began work on the farside.
The Lunascan Project was to be a world-wide effort
and use the efforts of others who had similar telescopic systems. Very
soon after the beginning of the project there was a definite need to fulfill
the dream of operating the system by remote control. I had to design a
flatbed type system to roll the scope out to its scanning location. The
idea became known as the STU, or Scope Transport Unit. While some of the
hardware was being constructed by a colleague nearby, the Lunascan Project
purchased a DOB Driver II computer system to provide the needed controls.
With the DDII you could scan the moon as we always had, by panning the
scope to the lunar limb, then allowing the Earth's rotation to scan the
moon in slices, then panning the scope back to the limb again. Slight changes
in the altitude adjustment under the "pan" mode created slightly different,
but very smooth, scanning sections. And if one wanted to park over a feature,
the DDII could be put into "tracking mode" and park right over the large
crater. It was, and still is, a remarkable system I highly recommend to
anyone.
Re-Discovery of the Blair Cuspids
One of our accomplishments ( I say, "our", because
I had help from day one) by The Lunascan Project was to solve the initial
mystery of where the Blair Cuspids were located. I had seen a small photograph
and a brief report in 1971 in a NICAP publication showing what looked like
"towers" on the moon. They were explained as boulders sitting on crater
rims with the low sun angle producing the long shadows that made them look
like obelisks. In the June 1971 issue of the NICAP UFO Investigator, someone
wanted copies of the photos. The response from NICAP was that they didn't
have copies of these pictures available for general distribution. They
had been taken in November 1966 by NASA's Lunar Orbiter spacecraft (not
Ranger, as stated by NICAP's interviewer) and were available only from
NASA. The principal photograph showing the "towers" was listed as picture
No. 86-H-758, and the report stated that scientists now believed that the
lunar features casting the strange shadows were not as tall as originally
assumed
and therefore could not properly be described as "towers." They were probably
more like cubes or pyramids in shape. The shadows appeared elongated because
the terrain on which they fall slopes downward, away from the protuberances,
distorting the shadows' true shapes. Or so said the brief report.
Within months of the launch of The Lunascan Project,
the catalog of items and possible anomalies reported in the past mounted,
and included the "Blair Cuspids". So in 1995 I pondered these questions:
Where were these towers on the Moon? Were they on the nearside or the farside?
On what Rukl Chart (lunar section) did they fall in and what were they
near? And most of all: What were they? Richard Hoagland had never mentioned
them, yet he HAD mentioned something similar, "the Shard." Were these objects
the same things or something else? Or, even more interesting, were these
alleged objects or artifacts in the same area or region? It didn't take
us too long to find out. After 24 years the "Blair Cuspids" were "re-discovered".
With the help of the VGL group (SPSR's own Lan Fleming, and Jon Floyd,
Mike Lomax, and Bill Kohler) and David Williams of NSSDC (National Space
& Science Data Center), the Lunascan Project was able to solve the
initial mystery of WHERE these towers were located, but many new questions
and mysteries cropped up. Maybe the explanation put forth in 1971 was a
little too simple an answer. My discovery of an additional image of the
Cuspids, immediately investigated by the VGL team may have proved the sun
angle hypothesis inadequate. The report on the Blair Cuspids is Status
Report No. 3 .
Imaging with the 16" f/4.5
By late summer of 1996 the Scope
Transport Unit with 16" f/4.5 was completed and
imaging began in August. Some of the best images obtained were made during
this month as we searched for a possible repetition of an anomaly on the
peaks of Tycho predicted with colongitude by ALPO's David O. Darling. From
Section Directory 64, here is a selected image
(Tyc960822) from the August 22 session. And the
next image was captured earlier on August 7th, 1996, at about 2:40 AM,
8h40m CUT. From Section Directory 31, the image 960807-02xce
is of the mighty Copernicus, a 58-mile-wide crater with central peaks.
I had become a member of ALPO, and David and I struck up a very good relationship.
David has fought for 20 years to keep LTPs a respectable and serious area
of lunar research . Our search began and involved over forty scanning sessions.
Our cameras recorded 1800 images per minute and most sessions were two
hours, sometimes four.
Pay dirt!!!
On September 21, 1996, a little more than a year
after the project began, The Lunascan Project tracked an unknown object
near moon. A detailed report on ULO-092196
is the basis for a separate paper to SPSR (Status Report No. 3), suffice
it say that at no time during any of the 40 two-hour-long (or more) sessions
had we observed or videotaped anything like this object. It was tracked
for about 20 seconds right near the SE limb of the moon and in space. An
EZC computer check showed no planets or anything else that would be large
enough or bright enough to be detected with the bright lunar limb washing
it out. Our immediate concern was a dangerously close asteroid which might
be able to strike the Earth, if not the moon. If our calculations were
right the object was about 2 miles in diameter. On October 1st I
reported the tracking to David Williams, of NSSDC (National Space &
Science Data Center) in Greenbelt, Maryland. He requested that I contact
Steve Pravdo, JPL's (Jet Propulsion Lab) task master for the Near-Earth
Asteroid Tracking program. Within a day or so a quick email response from
NEAT told us that ULO-092196 was not an asteroid. That left us with an
unidentified object near the moon!
Better System Needed
Images in general from the huge 16" f/4.5 were not
as satisfactory as desired, but most of this was due to the combination
of the size of the very flat mirror and the poor atmospherics of
the midwest. Being a "light bucket", and designed more for deep space work
on galaxies than lunar imaging, the 16" Meade produced images too bright
and with little contrast, plus it was a very heavy piece of equipment.
At the time, some of the best images on the internet came from Charles
Genovese. Thomas Dobbins had probably succeeded more with this type of
imaging and was a friend of Genovese, and I was always jealous of Charles'
and Tom's famed 10" f/6's. Another advisor to the project was Jack Wolfe,
who had some great long focal length telescope inventions. All suggested
a major change in optics. By the summer of 1997 we seriously considered
building a 10" f/6, almost from scratch. By January of 1998 we decided
to go for it and we sold the 16" mirror of the giant Meade to get us started.
With the aide of Charles Genovese and Milt Hayes, and donations from generous
Lunascan members, we began preparations. In June we received, donated by
Jack Wolfe, a 10" Cassegrain mirror. Before the summer was over we
had constructed the new
HPS unit and it was online that fall. The power
was less, about 320x (compared to the 16" 400x), but the contrast of the
images was much better.
We later added a Medium Power Scanning unit to
the system, using a 4-1/2" f/8 newtonian reflector. Originally the MPS
was mounted on the upper right of the main tube and the power generated
was about half that of the 10" f/6, or about 160x. The temptation became
too great for us and we added yet another scope to the array, an LPS (Low
Power Scanning) unit that was a very good, high-res studio grade TV camera
and telephoto lens. But set-up and alignment became a time-costly nightmare
and the LPS (which was belly-slung) was eliminated. The array now has the
MPS belly-slung and operates very well.
As stated earlier, I was an independent contractor
and working for Mid-Tech on what is still a confidential project. By the
end of 1999, funding to start that project had not been granted and I had
to go to work like everyone else. About 15 more scanning sessions which
took considerable set-up and take-down time, now became less often and
ceased for over a year. But this is about to change.
Apollo Over the Moon & Moon Shot
During the summer of 2001 I received permission
and created a new
set of web pages with links to and from the Rukl
directories on all the images and accompanying text from SP-362,"Apollo
Over The Moon". We already had the orbiter links. Now we had the
best of the Apollo Metric and Panoramic images, filed right where they
belong in the appropriate Rukl directory. Early in the project work on
the Lunascan web site most of the lunar missions had been posted on our
directory called Moon
Shot ". But not all of the Russian space probes
to the moon had been listed there. In September all of them were added
and the Apollo pages were updated.
A Review of the Images
During the last few months of 2001 I began reviewing
and re-processing
the images from all the 40 data tapes. The tapes were played back through
an Aperture Video Correction device, where the images were darkened with
a gain control and sharpened before they were fed into the main computer.
The playback could be executed at normal speed, slow motion, or paused
for best frame out of the 30 frames per second we recorded. About 20-24
best images from each session were saved as 1500x1125 pixel bitmaps. Thumbnails
of the images were made at 225x169 pixels and the two groups were separated;
the original, full-sized bitmaps saved on CD-R, and the "thumbs" on the
hard drive filed under the session date.
We could now locate any image from any session
very quickly, then go to the full-sized version on disc to process any
new image experiment. For those familiar with the way NASA's Lunar Orbiter
pages are set up, our pages have the image data and thumbnails and link
to the best processed image. Hard copies are also made and placed in binders
with the full report on the sessions. Any worthy image is then posted on
the web site under the appropriate directory. At present we have processed
all the images from the 16" f/4.5 and have begun processing the images
from the 10" f/6.
Imaging sessions of the moon will resume in 2002
with some new techniques to boost the power beyond previous attempts under
better atmospheric conditions.
Francis Ridge
Coordinator,
The Lunascan Project
