You sound liek you’re poo pooing a conspiracy, when there is none, just misunderstood artifacts from converting to a jpeg.
I've done some looking around, and found a
higher res image with none of the artifacts present as in the other one. (It looks like all of the Apollo 11 images can be found
here). Actually, I'm no expert, having toyed with photoshopping, but so many artifacts bunched up at the horizon line is strange. I wouldn't be a bit surprised that someone at NASA is having a little fun with all the conspiracy nuts who've for years claimed that there's "cities on the moon". (Not sure - was Hoagland one of them?)
That's a problem with NASA images spread all over the place - there needs to be one site where all the images are accessed. All the original negatives should be scanned at high resolution and offered, with no cropping whatsoever, as lossless .tif's, (or better yet, .png's), as well as .jpg's. They're not copyrighted, and shouldn't be, since we ultimately paid for them.
Maybe it's all moot, though. The whole moon landing phase was a hoax perpetrated in a tV studio somewhere. :)
