Barking Mad
Self-
The green hills of Earth
First up is a topic that has created a lot of comment as he backs and forths with the occasional person who isn’t actually him in his comments section.
It’s based on a throwaway comment made by Gene Cernan in this video:
“[Earth] was very close to the horizon on Apollo 17 and that was unique for us we didn't have to look up like most of the other flights from most of the other Landing sites were to look at the Earth I mean I just glance over my shoulder and there's the Earth.”
Now, anyone who knows anything about Gene Cernan is he loves a good yarn, and his tales have been told so often they can take on a life of their own. Stray takes issue with that “close to the horizon” quote, partly because his own subjective interpretation of “close” doesn’t match with what he understands to be available in the Apollo photographic record.
Initially he seems content with the figure recorded in Apollo documentation, like this table.
Hilariously, he mistakes the sun’s altitude for the Earth, claiming a huge change in altitude over the course of the EVA. His main objection comes from the fact that his idea of close to the horizon differs. In fact at one point he states quite specifically that the Earth is exactly where it should be in the Apollo photos.
Here are some typical views from magazine 134 and 137.
Things take a turn when he tries to do maths. Or at least get a range of AI packages to do the maths for him. As far as he is concerned, his new figure for where Earth should be is around 70 degrees above the horizon, based on the simple premise that the Taurus-
By far the longest exchanges relate to his insistence that popular astronomy software Stellarium, NASA’s own website where lunar ephemeris can be calculated, and even the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter website vindicate his stance.
Let’s deal with that one first. Here’s what he has to say:
“LROC QuickMap (Arizona State University): This tool, based on Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data, shows Earth high in the sky (~70°) when viewed from the Apollo 17 site at EVA times.”
And
“LROC Quick Map: This tool uses actual Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter topographic data. If you use the "Sun/Earth" tool on Quick Map at the Apollo 17 site, it confirms the high elevation.”
OK then. This is the only possible thing he can mean at the quickmap.
By changing the projection to ‘Lunar Globe’, it’s possible to set your location to a specific spot and rotate around it. You also have the option of entering a start date, and displaying the Earth. Here I’ve set the start date to coincide with Apollo 17, and I’m rotating around a point in the Taurus-
It does not show the position of the Earth above the South Massif, nor does it ever “confirm the high elevation”.
Prove me wrong.
Now for NASA/JPL ephemeris figures, which he calls “the gold standard”. You need to go to this website and type in the relevant values.
Which gives you:
The column we need is the ‘Elev’ column, which reads from a minimum of 44.02 degrees to a maximum of 45.28 degrees. The gold standard fundamentally contradicts straydog’s claims.
Now for Stellarium. Stray insists that Stellarium shows his 70 degrees figure, and that the reason nobody else gets that value is because we’re all doing it wrong. Here’s how we all, apparently, have been doing it wrong:
“This [45 degrees] is impossible, because Stellarium itself uses the JPL DE ephemerides, the Moon’s rotation matrix, and topocentric geometry. When set correctly, it ALWAYS reproduces the same result as SPICE within <0.3°.
Stellarium has two Moon observers:
Center of Moon (wrong!)
Topocentric surface point (correct)
Your troll’s friend 100% used the center of the Moon, which drops Earth altitude by ~25°.”
Well, for a start I have yet to find anywhere in Stellarium’s set up that allows libration to be turned off As for using the topocentric surface, it’s enabled by default in my version. What it does is ensure that you’re getting azimuths and altitudes relative to your position, rather than the point measured from the moon’s gravitational centre. In reality, turning off that figure does very little to the Earth’s altitude -
As you can see, there’s no real variation at all, certainly not the 25 degrees stray thinks should be happening because we’re all so incompetent at using it, and it’s nothing to do with him having never used it at all and relying on force-
The other thing you’ll notice there is that there isn’t a lunar surface visible. You can change Stellarium’s landscape to match where it say you’re viewing, and stray has become convinced that this landscape is what the software is somehow measuring. He’s at least moved on from claiming that the 45 degree figure is because it was measuring from orbit.
It is not the landscape.
The landscape files for Stellarium use a simple ‘.png’ file, referenced in 3D space by other software and imported into the program. The software absolutely does not reference that imagery when calculating the various coordinates available to you as a user. Here’s the same scene presented with and without the landscape.
Absolutely no difference whatsoever to the figures it generates. Zero. Because it’s looking at a set zero datum that has nothing to do with whichever arbitrary choice of landscape you want. You might notice the grid superimposed on the view.
You might also notice which lines intersect Earth. It’s not 70 degrees. If you’re really observant you’ll spot that the first visible line on the Apollo landscape isn’t zero -
Here they are superimposed.
Earth is now more correctly positioned, but the values displayed on the left are unchanged. Stray’s claim that Stellarium is somehow mistakenly reading the top of the south massif isn’t helped by the original positioning of Earth being nowhere near it!
There’s a lot of discussion about Stellarium, and how everyone else is using it wrong and if only you use it properly there you’ll get the figures he wants. Not once has he ever done that. Nowhere does he do what I’ve done above: provide an illustration of the numbers. It’s “trust me bro” -
Speaking of the view, his next big “a-
Oh no! You can’t see Earth, it must be fake!
It doesn’t seem to occur to him that the black sky might have been filled in by the Moonpans website in creating the panorama. In this part of the Moonpans site, the construction is explained:
There’s very obviously some filling in of missing sky. Still sceptical? Let’s take one of the photos taken at the flag showing Earth and superimpose it on the south massif, using the same points on the landscape to get the alignment correct.
Fancy software wasn’t around when the Apollo missions were, so these panoramas were hand assembled. Here it is on the ALSJ site:
This version is from the Geology report, a physical copy of which I own.
The Earth is very obviously not in the field of view of the camera.
Stray tries to make a big deal about the that field of view, claiming that the Hasselblad 60mm lens used only has a 47 degree view, but seems to forget that a substantial amount of that field here is made up of the ground. Even he says it’s not reliable:
“You also can’t derive altitude angles reliably from a wide-
He also says that
“the photographer had to either bend down, or get on his knees”
to get the photos. Which is exactly what they did (see below).
It’s worth reminding everyone here that initially he was happy that Earth was correctly placed!
Straydog then turns his razor sharp AI to the Earth itself. He posts links to other ‘studies’ claiming that Earth was pasted in to the scene, and where there are blocky jpeg artefacts in around Earth. Nothing he says is original.
The ‘research’ he’s basing it on is Jack White, a self proclaimed photographic expert who somehow managed to get himself on the committee investigating the assassination of JFK. Much of his testimony is of his examining photographs until he decided he’d found what he was looking for. The most telling moment of it is when he revealed he had no idea what “photogrammetry” is.
His analysis of the Earth in the Apollo 17 photo concerned, as reported on the aulis website says this:
"Gradual removal of hues comprising black revealed that the black around the earth did not match the black in the host photo."
He gives no indication as to the source of his photograph, or how he went about ‘removing hues’. We have no idea if he was using an original photo, a scan of an original photo, or a reproduction of a scan of the original that may have had retouching work done by someone unrelated to NASA. It’s “trust me bro”. Again.
In fact, much of his ‘work’ seems to revolve around looking at low resolution scans and bitching when better quality ones come along.
Those square boxes that he manages to somehow create are nowhere to be seen on the contemporary physical copies, like these from my collection.
It turns out that trying to recreate the effect that Jack found is quite hard. There are some very obviously low resolution versions of the image around if you trawl through the wayback machine, like the ones below from the Lunar Planetary Institutes old ‘Apollo Image Atlas’, and the Gateway to Astronaut Photography’s low resolution version.
Nor is this claim by straydog true:
“The high-
As shown here using March to the Moon and Flickr archive scans.
All we have here is someone trying to make a scanned image look like the original, and introducing artefacts into the image in the process. That’s all it is. Anything else is just projection of your bias.
The originals can’t have been digitally altered -
Stray’s AI sources claim that the Earth in the photos are from a “high-
Geostationary satellites could give a whole Earth, but that view is static and therefore can’t show changes over time that the Apollo photographic and live TV record show. There were also no colour satellites in operation at the time. The views of Earth also show meteorologically accurate views that can only have been taken at the time of the mission. In the photo White uses, we can confirm the satellite record, and it’s also matched by a live TV view taken a short while later (as evidenced by the movement of weather systems towards the equator).
Too long didn’t read?
Someone too lazy to do their own maths asks leading questions of AI to try and make 2+2=5. Anyone insisting that 2+2=4 doesn’t understand maths, or is using the wrong version of 2.
The fact is that one man’s subjective recall of how Earth appeared in the sky is being twisted to suit someone else’s agenda. No amount of insisting that black is white is going to make the incorrect ramblings of AI software into an adequate substitute for actually knowing what you’re talking about. Gaslighting people by saying they are using software incorrectly when it’s very obvious that you have never used it yourself is not going to prove anything. Doing the actual work yourself instead of believing what you’ve convinced AI to tell you is the only way you’ll realise that you’re wrong.
The position of Earth in the lunar sky in Apollo 17 photographs and live TV is exactly correct. The best that stray can claim is that Cernan’s recall is imperfect, and/or that his personal definition of “close to the horizon” doesn’t fall within what he’s decided counts as “close”. As straydog02 himself says:
“When you are debating the validity of the mission and the authenticity of the photos, the only number that matters is the geometric elevation above the true lunar horizon.”
That figure is 45 degrees -
Add to that the natural wobble of the moon in relation to Earth (libration) and there’s a little more variation. He knows that exists, but all he manages to do is subtract libration values from his false 70 degrees figure to produce answers that are still incorrect.
At one point he claims the Apollo lunar Surface Journal makes references to a figure of 60-
Another claim he had to backtrack from (or pretend that it was a trap!) was that the elevation of Earth wasn’t ever mentioned, and certainly not 45 degrees. The obvious response to that is to quote this from the transcript:
“142:44:42 Parker: You might check the low-
…
142:45:00 Cernan: Okay. Yeah, we are at 45 degrees (low-
Stray’s response to that is to go into a long discussion about how the earth elevation is actually just antenna elevations, nothing to do with Earth. Except he seems to think it relates to the High Gain Antenna (HGA), not the Low Gain Antenna (LGA) referenced by Cernan:
“The HGA elevation angle is a mechanical angle internal to the antenna mount, referenced to the rover/antenna assembly, not to the lunar horizon.”
“As we discussed before, the LRV high-
He also references a specific document that deals with radiation management, quoting text that does not appear any within it. He does at least mention this document as a source, which does have relevant information in it. When combined with this document we can get a proper picture. Dealing with the antenna he thinks we’re talking about, the HGA is the large umbrella like piece of equipment that needs to be pointed pretty precisely at Earth in order to work.
The HGA is aligned by first getting a rough alignment by eye, then using a combination of a boresight and a meter indicating S-
As far as the LGA is concerned, that does have markings on it, but the documentation says this:
“The antenna elevation (lunar surface to earth) is set by unlocking the elevation adjustment lock, tilting the antenna at pivot point to desired elevation angle, and re-
The bold emphasis is mine, but the reference is specific. What stray is trying to imply is that the rover is on a slope, and the 45 degree angle is what’s needed to compensate for that slope. Luckily we have a couple of good photos of the LRV in place at Station 2.
The HGA antenna here is pointing at Earth, which is out of shot. In order for an Earth 70 degrees above horizontal to be reading as 45 degrees, the rover should be on a a 25 degree slope. That’s steeper than the actual South Massif.
Here’s something else the document he’s using contains -
Just adjusting the levels doesn’t work on those -
In fact if you look carefully you can even see the jpeg compression artefacts on the low resolution originals without any work on them!
To get it just right, you need to follow the process as it’s likely to have been with an an early generation scanner and image editor. The four images below follow the sequence. The high resolution version from the ‘Gateway to astronaut photography’ is top left. Scanning adds a lot of colour detail that isn’t there because it’s light reflecting off a glossy photograph. The next step is to remove the colour that this has added (top right). Hmm -
Stray makes a big deal about my modifying the landscape. Apparently that’s a “red flag”, and I have “admitted” changing it. Conspiracy nuts love to say you’ve “admitted” something. It makes it sound like they forced it out of you at gunpoint and it’s a victory for them. What he means by “admitted” here is that I found a problem with Stellarium’s landscape, fixed it, told everyone I’d fixed it, and gave them the files so they could use it themselves. My making of that change made not one iota of difference to the elevation figures, it just made the view look more correct, as you can see below. The top line is the two png files used by Stellarium, with the original configuration on the left. The latitude/longitude figures are give from the landscape.ini file.
And here’s how that translates into the view using exactly the same date and time (13/12/72, 07:00).
