Indeed and I would not give any items to the RAFM or IWM as there is no guarantee the stuff would be kept or displayed. Going to Cardington (as was) showed that tons of great stuff was there and would never be used. My gran used to say that if I went to Hendon I would see my grandad’s helmet, Irvin etc (he had the DFC AFC) but it never was. People just give stuff to them and it gets popped into store (a bucket of Aircrew Europe Stars). I found out that the Irvin had been swapped with a collector!!

I always advocate that families should keep medals etc or come up with a cast iron loan agreement. If they do not want to do so, giving stuff to a local museum is far better than letting it be lost in the store of a big museum.

The RAFM and IWM have such loan agreements – they are required to. Without wishing to offend, everyone and his dog wants their particular object displayed, often with a big brass plaque. Clearly that can’t happen.
There simply isn’t the room either on display or in storage, and there are often hundreds of similar items already in store. If something is accepted these days, it’s taken without any guarantee of display, but will be cared for to the highest standards. Further, the museum cannot simply dispose of it as they wish. Disposal is very difficult to “get”, as the responsibilities toward objects are many these days. Even if disposal is granted by curators and then the trustees (or equivalent) it must be offered to a range of other institutions before being allowed to go up for sale or, in the absolute last resort, destruction. Once upon a time something might be taken without receipt, without written agreement, and then skipped at a whim – if this happens now, the museum (national or accredited) is in serious trouble.

Less personal items are being acquired as a result, and I think it’s better that families keep these things where they mean the most. Failing that, smaller (registered or accredited) museums should get the chance to acquire, rather than simply adding another small box to a massive “Indiana Jones” style warehouse/museum store.

Finally, as collections become more digitised and accessible, if a large museum does acquire your object, it will one day be accessible to whomever finds it useful or interesting, either as a picture and a description, or something to physically go and look at. If no-one in the family is interested, and Ebay/Christies are out of the question, then by all means try RAFM/IWM or one of the others. As I understand it, RAFM is the designated depository for personal objects like medals, uniform, logbooks, whereas IWM have collected typologically and where display requires it.

Despite it being a negative proposition, wherein the onus should be upon you to prove your case, I answered your “blue reflection” point with the possibility that it was a reflection of the lunar landscape. I used the reference of another debunk because it was clear in the images that the lunar landscape can appear blue, and because it explained how it was possible to have landscape features in pictures where one might not expect them to be caught.

Yet you have failed to reply to this possible explanation. Why is that?

I’ll also bite on your “fuzzy shadows” claim. See this page http://library.thinkquest.org/28160/english/diffraction/waves.html

That help at all? I’m no photographer, so I could be talking ******** here, but might it also not have something to do with the LM shadow being photographed “close-up”, whereas the rock’s shadow is further away from the lens and so appears to be sharper?

[edit] – this site http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/nov98/912136118.Ph.r.html

gives this explanation:

“Besides being the basis for imaging optics, pinhole optics explains many odd little things in the everyday world. For example, why are shadows on the ground so very sharp if the opaque object is near the ground, but the edges of the shadows are fuzzy whenever the object is far from the ground? Why is the shadow of a crawling bug so sharp, yet the shadow of a flying airplane is totally fuzzed-out? And during sunset, why don’t we see the sharp shadows of distant hills racing across the ground? It’s because that “fuzz” on the edge of the shadows is composed of overlapped sun images, all lined up along the shadow edges. The edges of opaque objects acts as “half of a pinhole”. The greater the distance between the object and its shadow, the larger the sun’s disk-image becomes, and so the band of “shadow fuzz” is also larger. The hill-shadows DO rush across the ground at sunset, but because their band of fuzz is so enormous, we only see an increasing darkness and we never see any motion. Look at the shadow of a chain-link fence. The shadow of the top of the fence is fuzzy, while the shadow of the bottom of the fence is not. It’s because of pinhole optics and sun-disk images. If the sun was a “dot,” all the shadows would be sharp, and in many ways the world would look like a very different place.”

http://www.iangoddard.net/moon01.htm

Scroll down and look at the “Identical Backgrounds” debunk. Could the reflection be part of the lunar landscape? The idea is at least as valid as your “OMFG HOAX!!!!!!11111” theory.

Of course. In the absence of another explanation, of course we must go with yours. Stands to reason.

Where’s Buzz Aldrin when you need him?

http://www.csicop.org/articles/20021018-aldrin/

That Iron Cross plantation is superb. I’d heard a similar story about British POWs, I’m sure.

Yeah, but if you squint and cover your ears…

TwinOtter23,

Duxford is now trialling an optional (as was the previous incarnation of Gift Aid) £1.30 surcharge (10% of an adult ticket value) which will enable those that wish to continue helping DX with Gift Aid contributions. This is clearly not ideal, as there is a cost to the visitor, but its take-up will be monitored over the coming months. It’s impossible to say what effect the changes will have on museum’s “at the gate” funding, but AirSpace itself is (as I understand things) funded by and large by designated chunks money from various sources.

Quite a minor point, but it’s not “Air and Space”, it’s “AirSpace”.