Somewhere in Thailand a half-blind, brain-damaged ex-pat spends what little time on Earth he has left making pointless overlong videos that show just how ill-informed he is about Apollo and hurling abuse at anyone who proves him wrong, which people do, repeatedly. If he could string a sentence together his videos would take half the time to watch.

Along with a sock puppet army of sycophants and imaginary friends he is single-handedly responsible for lowering the IQ of a whole country. On a brighter note, at least Wales is a smarter place now, because he isn’t in it. If I were Wales I’d turn the lights out and pretend I wasn’t in if he tries to come back.

I’m not going to link to his videos, he gets enough traffic as it is, but here are some of the low hanging fruit that are just too easy to hit.

There are no tracks from Apollo 17’s final resting place back to the LM.

At the end of Apollo 17’s mission the Gene Cernan drove the lunar rover to a spot around 100 metres from the lunar module where it could use the on board TV camera  to film the lift-off of the ascent module.

To support his claim, he brings up photographs and say “Where are the tracks?”. Here’s one of them, AS17-143-21931:

And here is what he had to say about it in the comments to one of his videos:

 “there are no tracks at all from the rover to the lem or from the lem to the rover idiot

CHECK

NOTHING BETWEEN THE ROVER AND THE LEM SO HOW CAN ANY LRO TAKE A PHOTO OF SOMETHING THAT IS NOT THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE”

Is he correct?

Of course not. Let’s adjust the levels on that photo and see what we can see:

Why, what’s that we see there? Could they be the tracks taff denies are there?

Yes, they are. There are some going off to the LRV’s right, likely from previous EVAs, and some to the LRV’s left. More on that shortly.

Some of taff’s confusion stems from his complete lack of knowledge. He claims that there should be tracks from the rover back to the LM. If he bothered to watch the TV footage and read the transcripts he would know that Cernan did not go directly back to the LM, but went via the Surface Electrical Properties experiment north of the final ‘VIP’ parking spot. There is only one set of tracks - the rover track from the LM to the VIP site, and only Cernan went there.

Cernan even managed a fragment of TV broadcast while he was driving capturing the LM in the background, below left, and you can make out some of the trail from the VIP spot to the SEP location in the LRO and partially in the 16mm ascent footage.

Despite taffy’s denials, Jack Schmitt did not go with Cernan to the VIP spot but was busy at the ALSEP site, and even took photos of the rover while he did so, such as AS17-134-20507, seen here in total and with the rover zoomed in on. He can also be seen in the TV footage shot from the rover.

The angle of the tracks is entirely consistent with the angle that the wheels were left in. The aren’t the tracks from any other trips, as the outward and return journeys of other EVA’s did not follow this route.

So, in summary, while taff claims that the LRV magically appeared at the VIP spot, the tracks in the surface and LRO images, as well as footage broadcast while en route to it, show otherwise.

No tracks in AS15-82-11091

Hmm - seems to be an obsession of his. Well, here’s the photo he’s on about, and next to it is one where I’ve adjusted the brightness levels to show, well…tracks.

An Apollo 15 image at ground level was taken by Japan’s Kaguya/Selene probe

Now this is just hilarious, and demonstrates just how dumb taff is.

He posted a video showing these two images side by side, claiming that one (and occasionally both) originated from Japan’s lunar orbiter. An orbiter which, it’s worth pointing out, he also claims is fake. His poor damaged brain can’t imagine how it is possible for a craft in lunar orbit to take photos of at ground level, but such is his contorted and ludicrous thinking that he still claims that it took the photos, even though he also says it doesn’t exist.

Here are the images (AS15-82-11056 and 57:

They form part of a nice panorama.

This article is, I believe, is the origin of his misconception. The article has an Apollo image, clearly captioned ‘The Apollo 15 Lunar Module in 1971’ and with a filename of ‘apollo_15_lm.jpg’’:

However what he hasn’t spotted, because the article contains long words he won’t have understood, is that the article is reporting Selene’s finding of ground around the Apollo 15 LM that has been altered by its interaction with the LM descent engine.

Nowhere does it claim that the image at the top of the article was taken by the Japanese probe.

There it is. The entirety of his argument, a misreading of a webpage. As far as the use of Kaguya data when making 3D images, it has been pointed out to him many times that it did not have to swoop down from orbit to take a photo at ground level. Only a grade A moron would think that. Only a substandard moron would continue to think that after having a video like this shown to him, which I made to demonstrate how you can use the 3D data.

The missing Apollo 17 flag

Woah - massive smoking gun here, old twatty nails it to NASA by showing two Apollo 17 images without the flag by the -LM! Oh noes! Whatever shall we do? Well, best take a look though - here they are, AS17-143-21925 and AS17-143-21932:

Except..erm…what’s this? Let’s zoom in on them…

Poor half-blind half-wit taffy also makes the mistake of saying that the flag shown above left is the ALSEP.

Anyhow, case closed: two photos both showing the stars and stripes, complete with pole and shadow.

Dark paths are fake in LRO images, says his dog

One of daft taff’s sillier claims that shows he’s been holed up in the jungle too long without the benefit of civilised company is that his dogs demonstrated that the LRO is fake. The reason, he argues, is that his dogs dug into the local soil to keep cool in the damper, darker, subsoil. This is against the conventional (and correct) explanation is that the disturbed ground contrasts against the more sunbleached surface.

The only way, he says, you can get a darker underlayer is if it is wet.

Uh-huh.

As you can see from those images of tremendously wet looking places, he’s completely wrong.

Apollo 17’s two different fender repairs

It’s a famous story - the fender on Apollo 17’s lunar rover broke, and because the surface dust caused so many problems they needed to fix it. The solution involved some maps and duct tape.

FAKE! Cries taff. Why? Because these two photographs. One is a map, the other is just paper.

Wow - pretty shocking stuff. Well, let’s see the photographs:

Well, pretty convincing stuff. The black and white image (AS17-135-20542) looks all papery, while the colour one (AS17-137-20979) has all sorts of markings on it, so it must be the map right?

OK, let’s take a closer look.

Ah right, so what you actually have on the colour image is not all kinds of mappy looking markings, it’s just coated in a load of moon dust. There’s more on the colour image because it was taken a couple of hours later after some driving around. You can also see that the duct tape is identical in both images and that it is clamped in exactly the same place.

We can tell it isn’t actually map side up because Gene brought the repair kit home, and here are some photos if it in it final resting place at the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum.

Again, let’s zoom a little closer on them:

Oh look - grid lines. The actual mappy bit of the map was on the underside of the repair.

Duh.

NASA didn’t have any photos of rover deployment until taffy demanded them

Yep, he actually makes this claim. According to him:

Ten years ago would be..let me see now..2008, even taff’s maths must be that good, so it’s a bit weird that I own this box set of Apollo 15 mission video dating from 2002:

and this youtube video showing a film made in 1971, which kind of makes him look like an idiot. Again.

The air compressor on the moon

Taffy makes this claim several times in videos and in comments on videos. He bases his claim on this image, which I’ve zoomed and cropped:

He thinks the grille like pattern on the ‘compressor’ are cooling fins, which he also thinks should be impossible because there is no air to cool them. We’ll skip over the fact that if they were cooling fins they’d work just fine because a large surface area to radiate heat away from a heat source would still work.

Anyhow, is he correct, or just an idiot?

Let’s have a look at a diagram of a piece of equipment on the suit called a purge valve. Here it is in a suit handbook:

Is this the same thing as can be seen on the Apollo photo used by taffy? Well, there’s an obvious thing to do, and that’s to rotate the image so that it’s the same orientation as the Apollo image and see if there are similarities.

Hmm - seems there are. Still, taffy is half blind, so stereoscopic vision is a problem for him. Maybe it would help him out if there were some colour pictures of the same thing, ideally with the ball thing in there as well. Oh wait, seems there are, including some 16mm footage!

For the record it’s AS15-86-11599 (bottom right) AS15-88-11864 (top left) and, just to be inclusive, AS16-114-18388 (top right). The 16mm shot (bottom left) can be found at 14:10 here.

There’s also this very clear shot taken during training:

In short, taff is a dumb fuckwit who has made another knee-jerk claim about what he thinks something is without bothering to do any checking as to what it might actually be.

The Magical Moving Hammer

Still with the Apollo 15 air compressor image, taff makes another bizarre and totally ludicrous claim: that the hammer on the rock moves without anyone touching it. The air compressor image is one of two taken at roughly the same time at station 9A by Hadley Rille. For the record, here they are together:

It’s interesting to note that the colour image above has some tracks visible curving round the rover’s left hand side where Gene is standing.

They disappear to once they get to around the same distance as the rover, and the reason is likely to be because it made a turn to our left so that the TV camera would be facing the LM. In the final TV footage taken with Gene at the rover, we can make out those tracks curving round on the left hand side.

At about 2:30 into this video, Dave can be seen doing exactly what taff claims he did not: moving the hammer

To be continued…sadly…

Apollo image AS17-143-20453 was only made in the past few years

Yes, it seems that NASA didn’t stop making Apollo images in 1972, they carried on. Taff’s claim is that because he hadn’t seen this image before:

then it was only made recently. Hmm…then how do you explain the existence of this then?

That’s right, it’s my own copy of a 1973 National Geographic magazine containing the same image that taff thinks was only made recently. Oops. Or then there’s this one, seen in Petersen’s Man in Space series volume 5, published in 1974, which is the next photograph in the Apollo magazine.

Or then there’s this from my copy of the 1975 book “Apollo Expeditions to the moon”:

Shock news taff: just because you didn’t know about it, doesn’t mean it didn’t exist.

Whisteblower pencil lines on AS17-143-21932

Yeah we’re back on the VIP parking spot again, this time with the claim that there is a line, drawn with a pencil, on part of the LRV by some imaginary whistleblower or other. Here we go:

It’s also claimed that the black reseau cross is exactly the same as the alleged pencil line, and that it is the same length.

So, is it a pencil line? Is it bollocks.

During each EVA the rover batteries were covered to prevent them getting covered in dust. At the end of each EVA they were uncovered to help with temperature regulation.

Here’s what the battery covers look like when down:

You can clearly see that there is a definite lip to the lid.

Here’s a photo of them raised on the LRV at the end of EVA-3, and a shot from the TV footage after Cernan has raised them at the VIP spot. Below that is an Apollo 15 image showing the covers raised, very obviously showing that the battery covers did have a lip capable of casting a shadow.

So, it should be obvious that the raised object is the battery cover lid. The angle of the sun is such that the lip at the top of the box lid after it has been raised will cast a shadow.

Does the line match exactly the dimensions of the reseau cross? Let’s see.

That’s a no then.

Apollo 17 images were Photoshopped in 2007

Taff has discovered metadata. Taff thinks metadata proves everything. Taff has seen metadata from these two images, AS17-134-20506 and AS17-140-21371 that identifies Photoshop 3 as the software that created them in 2007. They did not exist, therefore, prior to 2007. Here they are:

The one on the right is very easy to dispose of quickly as it appears in my 1973 National Geographic that I linked to earlier - it’s even on the same page of another image he claimed didn’t exist, here it is:

I’ve deliberately left the centre fold in there to show that this is a paper document.

The other one is slightly trickier as I don’t own a document with it in. However it can be found elsewhere. There is, for example, this image for sale on ebay

Notice it says it’s from a magazine article, which means it exists on paper somewhere.

It can also be found on this webpage:

I’ve edited that shot so that only the relevant bits appear, but visit the site, have a look. Email them if you think it’s not right.

The image is also included on CD accompanying the Apogee book Apollo 17: The Mission Reports, published in 2002.

Taffy also manages to ignore an image taken at the same time showing roughly the same view but from a slightly different angle, namely AS17-134-2057 that I looked at earlier. That image appears in this 1973 publication Apollo 17 at Taurus-Littrow:

The lens flare isn’t so obvious on there, but if you mess around with the contrast you’ll find it.

Taff’s problem here is that he just can’t get to grips with the idea that an online image might actually exist on paper, and that just because something has been through Photoshop it doesn’t mean that it has only ever existed in Photoshop. As the industry standard software for dealing with images it is hardly surprising that you’ll find its mark in a vast array of digital images - even ones showing an actual book if that’s what was used to crop it.

It’s always worth remembering that the Apollo images on the web exist as paper copies of the positives from the Hasselblad cameras - you could even buy them from NASA if you sent in the right form.

Magical mobile phones,  in 1969

Taffy’s latest spew of stupid makes a few claims about AS11-44-6574. Here it is:

It’s one of a series of photographs taken by Michael Collins after they separate from the CSM as he carries out a visual inspection of the craft.

There’s a lot of nonsense about him not understanding how diffraction spikes and lens flares work, or that there aren’t any lights on in the LM (he obviously doesn’t drive in the dark), but there are two main things.

Firstly, he claims that NASA deliberately present the image as “upside down” as a way of trying to fool people that it’s in space when it isn’t. It’s utter nonsense, partly because in space there is no real up or down - that’s just something we use as a reference when we’re governed by gravity. They even reference this during the mission:

100:37:31 Collins: I think you've got a fine looking flying machine there, Eagle, despite the fact you're upside down.

100:37:36 Armstrong: Somebody's upside down.

He next comes up with his usual tosh about Photoshop, and makes the bold claim that because Photoshop didn’t exist before 2009, it didn’t exist either. He’s wrong about the Photoshop date, obviously - I used it in the 1990s! He’s also wrong about the photo not existing prior to that date. Here’s an original print from a site specialising in sales of vintage Apollo photographs.

I have it on CD in the Apollo 11 mission reports, published in 1999, and a version of it appears in print in that.

And in the 1970 index of 70mm photographs.

So when he says that he can see a hand holding a mobile phone in the image, something that wasn’t a thing for several decades, we know he’s jumped the shark. Again.