Chinese moon hoax

[MRC_Hans]

This seems not to have been covered yet (perhaps I'm timezone privileged):

According to my newspaper (I could link, but it is in Danish), some people are claiming that the recently published picture of the Moon from the Chinese sattelite is a fake.

Allegedly, it is just a slightly doctored copy of an old NASA picture from one of the Apollo missions.

Hans

[tomwaits]

i found this on google news:

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/12/04/495870.aspx

The good news for the Chinese is that Planetary Society blogger Emily Lakdawalla's clears them of outright fakery. The bad news is, she found evidence that the photo was badly retouched for public release.

[tomwaits]

with a funny quote at the end, also:

"This isn't the first time that photo problems have created illusory 'moon features,'" Oberg wrote in an e-mail. "The very first Soviet moon photo probe, Luna 3 in 1959, sent back images of the back side that included a view of what Moscow grandiosely called 'the Soviet Mountains,' stretching for hundreds of miles. It turned out to be an emulsion smear on the negative."