What is right or wrong with this material from The Shroud: A Critical Summary of Observations, Data and Hypotheses, by Robert W. Siefker and Daniel S. Spicer.
Table I, Item 5.1:
Compared to the frontal image, there is no double superficiality of the dorsal or back image.
Scored: Established
Comment:
An image formation hypothesis that is able to account for a frontal double superficiality of the face must also be consistent with there being no dorsal double superficiality..
Really? Can we say this? Do we know? We can barely see some image on the reverse side of the cloth for the ventral image. How do we know it wasn’t there for the dorsal image, only too faint to see with the methods used? Is it like saying at mid-morning that there are no stars in the sky? Might we say, “I think I don’t see.”
Colin Berry is wrong in calling this paper pseudoscience. It doesn’t rise to that level. This paper hurts legitimate shroud science. John Jackson should withdraw it from his website.
BTW, I see one star.
From shroud.wikispaces.com it is an easy matter to take front and back images and superimpose them, adjusting the opacity to taste. I do not detect any variation of image ‘transfer’ between the front and back images, and must state that for me, at least, the first statement is simply wrong, and therefore there is no need to account for it.
The illusion of a more complete image on the front may have been brought about by the blood marks, particularly on the arms, which help to define the middle of the body shape on the ventral, but not, of course, on the dorsal image.
In fact by carefully surveying the entire picture, I cannot find anything on the back of the shroud which is not present on the front – except one thing, which other researchers may be able to explain. Here goes:
The colouration of the back of the shroud is mostly typified by a dark longitudinal stripe right down the middle, with a sharp edge on the nail-wound side, and a more attenuated edge on the spear-wound side. At first thought, one would guess that it was due to different batches of warp thread, differently processed, and so producing differently coloured longitudinal bands. However, I have always understood that the front side of the shroud was the side with the greater warp thread visibility – 75% – (thanks to the 3/1 twill), while the proportion of visible warp thread on the back was only 25%. That being so, longitudinal bands should be more pronounced on the front side, which is not what we observe.
Picking up Dan’s final paragraph: STURP team examined the front-of-cloth image with a variety of lighting conditions, including Wood’s light (UV), Infra-red, and raking light. Does anyone know if similar lighting was used for the back-of-cloth, and does this give any new information on what is observed on the back-of-cloth image?
[BTW: The planet Venus is also very occasionally visible in full daylight. I saw it clearly visible mid-afternoon in 1962.]