Undoing faked Apollo Studio Videos (kidding)

Note: This is a repost from my old site. Time to move it over.

First, what is different about motion on the moon and on Earth? Since the moon has a smaller mass in spite of its smaller size*, the moon has a smaller gravitational field. The gravitational field on the surface of the moon is 1/6^th the field on the surface of the Earth. This means that the acceleration of a free falling on the object would be 1/6^th the acceleration on Earth. So the question is: how would you change the time scale of a movie so that it looks like its acceleration is 1/6^th of 9.8 m/s²?

*If you make the size of a planet smaller (without reducing the mass) the gravitational field on the surface gets larger.

So, 1 second on Earth would be 2.45 seconds on the moon. If I have a "moon" movie and I want to make it look like it really did in the studio (remember - I am joking) I would need to make the movie 0.408 times the original time length. It just so happens, I have a great video to do this with. Remember the "jump salute"? I did an analysis of this earlier. Well, I took this movie and using JES Deinterlacer (free program for Mac OS X), I adjusted the time length of the movie. Here is the Apollo jump salute movie as those recording it in the studio saw it:

Time Adjusted Apollo 16 Salute Jump from Rhett Allain on Vimeo.

And to make sure I am not crazy, I used video analysis techniques in the exact way before to determine the acceleration of the jumper. Here is a plot of the vertical position of the astronaut as a function of time with a parabolic fit.

As you can see, this has an acceleration of around 9.1 m/s² - close enough.

Here are some other videos I found from the apollo missions. I corrected the time on these also:

Clips from Apollo Moon landings on Earth gravity from Rhett Allain on Vimeo

Notice how it looks weird?

The next obvious step is to take some Earth movies and make them look like moon-movies. This first movie is of one of my daughters. I took the video with a still camera, so the frame rate is a little low. I wasn't going to post this, but it kind of makes it look like 1970's type movie.

Jumping on the moon from Rhett Allain on Vimeo

Also, here is a video I previously analyzed. This is the video of Kobe Bryant jumping over a car. I slowed it down so it looks like it is on the moon also.

Kobe Bryant Jumping on the moon from Rhett Allain on Vimeo