The "Impossible Odds" Zoom

Patrick Gaul, April 14, 2006

In mid-2005, Del Phillips asked me if I would be interested in helping him out with visual effects for the live performances of his then upcoming CD, The Delbert Window Pain Suites. Of course I was honoured and immediately said yes.

Then I set about listening to his music, jotting down ideas, and going over them with Del.  For me, the most compelling piece (at that time) was "Impossible Odds", a piece about the day that men first walked on the surface of the moon.  It had a special resonance for me, as a life-long space junkie.  At the time I was a kid living in Germany, and the memory of getting up in the middle of the night to watch on TV as Neil and Buzz stepped out onto the surface of the moon is as real in my mind today as if it happened last week.  So my visual approach to this demanded some special attention.

There is a passage in the piece where Del describes a dead salmon, lying at the bottom of Meade's creek near Lake Cowichan, BC:

If the physicists are right
And today of all days I believe in physicists
The salmon scales will reflect light back to the moon
A scant albedo...so very little light
But all it can
Adding its zillionth of a candlepower
To the glory of earthrise^†
Mirrored in the helmets of the spacemen

So the question in my mind was, "Could this have really happened?"

To research this, I set upon a quest of sorts.  First, I zeroed in on the date and time during which Neil and Buzz were walking on the surface of the moon: their walk spanned from approximately 9:30 p.m. Houston time on July 20, 1969 to shortly after midnight on July 21.

Then, I went to the NASA web site to look at a few images from that event, and I discovered two items that positively sent chills down my spine.

The first was a stunning detail in perhaps the most famous image that Armstrong had taken of Buzz Aldrin.  You can see a low-resolution copy of the image by clicking here (NASA Image AS11-40-5903 - Aldrin poses for portrait / Armstrong's reflection in visor - 257,797 bytes) and a high-resolution version by clicking here (NASA Image AS11-40-5903HR - Aldrin poses for portrait / Armstrong's reflection in visor - 1,173,657 bytes).  Here is a section of the latter image's view of Buzz Aldrin's helmet:

Image courtesy NASA

In the photo, the earth is clearly visible at the 11:30 o'clock position in Aldrin's visor.

Next, I looked at another image that Neil took from the rear of the lunar Module (LM), looking back to the Earth.  A low resolution copy of this image can be viewed here (NASA image AS11-40-5924 - LM ascent stage and Earth overhead - 118,979 bytes) and a high-resolution version here (NASA image AS11-40-5924HR - LM ascent stage and Earth overhead - 509,187 bytes).  Here is a detail of the Earth from the latter image (slightly enhanced for colour saturation):

Image Courtesy NASA

In this image, Australia is readily apparent at the left (approximately 10 o'clock), with the night/day terminator running through the centre of the Pacific.  For the purposes of our exercise, Lake Cowichan - on the West coast of British Columbia - would be "visible", although in darkness, at approximately the 4 o'clock position on the Earth's disk.

(Thank God they were using a Hasselblad!)

So it is clearly feasible (all other conditions permitting, such as weather!) that a small photon of light being reflected off of a fish scale at the bottom of a creek near Lake Cowichan could indeed have found its way over the vast distance to the moon to strike one of the astronauts' visors.

Now, being (admittedly anally) armed with the evidential basis for creating a visual animation that would represent the journey of such a photon of light, I turned to some computer software to render this journey.  Fortunately for me, I didn't have to go far; I own a copy of Starry Night Pro Plus (available from Imaginova), which can be used to simulate the position of planets and other satellites at specific points in time.  I generated a 3D animation that starts zooming out from Lake Cowichan and transits to the surface of the Moon at Tranquillity Base.  This journey was simulated to occur at 4:28 GMT on July 21, 1969.  If you click on the following image, you can access a movie (Zoom from Lake Cowichan to Tranquillity Base - July 21, 1969 @ 4:28 GMT - .WMV format, 8,534,768 bytes) that renders this entire journey. (Also note that the stars are rendered accurately - how many constellations can you identify?  Here's a hint: Orion is partially visible in the picture below.)  But while I'm being so anal, I might as well admit that it's not strictly accurate; the cloud patterns are based on a fixed bitmap in the software, and the journey does not go in a straight line, but a somewhat circuitous route that the software takes to create smooth transitions.  And the time that this journey takes in my animation is approximately 55 seconds; in real life it would take less than 2 seconds for light to traverse the distance.

Image and movie generated using Starry Night Pro Plus software

For the live show, I combined and animated images of a salmon and Buzz Aldrin's picture to create a more comprehensive zoom effect.  But to see that, you'll have to come to one of Del's live shows!

- Patrick Gaul

^†A footnote here: "Earthrise" never actually appears to a stationary observer on the Moon. The Moon, having a rotation period that is synchronous with its orbit around the Earth, always presents the same hemisphere to the Earth; conversely, any viewer in a specific location on the Moon will always see the Earth in approximately the same location in the sky (relative to the lunar ground). In fact this does vary by several degrees over the course of the lunar orbit, owing primarily to the eccentricity of the orbit and the inclination of the Moon's axis of rotation - so the Earth does appear to oscillate back and forth in a small region of the sky - but it never rises or sets.  However, we'll grant Del some artistic license here - personally, I think that "the glory of earthrise" is a dramatic and compelling phrase that belongs in the lyrics. ;-)