This Old Blog

Stopped by my local Whole Foods to pick up a few supper items; mushrooms, whole wheat pasta, red quinoa. Stuff that supposedly makes you healthier and superior to the folks who shop just down the road at the super Walmart. On the way out I spotted this odd combination of space kitsch and grocery cart with a red faux space shuttle that's big enough to keep a pair of small children, twins perhaps, imagining they're flying a real space shuttle around the isles while their parents try to fill the cart. And I flash back in time to when I sat on the upper bunk bed, with my younger brother in the lower bunk of the room we shared, watching on our black and white TV as Neil Armstrong slowly crawled down the ladder of the Eagle to the surface of the moon. And all the books Time published about space, and the beautiful illustrations of all those rockets we'd be building and flying in the very near future. And the first season of Star Trek, when William Shatner was reasonably res...

We spent Thursday going to the doctor for my wife and filling in the time doing other tasks. Friday we decided to make a quick trip over to the Kennedy Space Center and spend a few hours just touring the latest. I'd hoped to see something of the Atlantis exhibit, but it's still under construction with a tentative opening date of 29 June. We were also somewhat shocked at the cost of admission. The last time we were over there was in the mid-1990s with our two girls, who were still in elementary school at the time, but old enough to appreciate what they were seeing. Ticket prices at that time were pretty low. I don't remember what we paid as adults, but the kids cost $5 each. When we stopped in to check on prices we were shocked to see prices were $50/person and up, depending on what type of tour you wanted. Since the Atlantis exhibit wasn't ready we decided to pass and to just drive around Merritt Island and the general area from Rockledge to Titusville, including Coco...

Photo credit: Buzz Aldrin/Apollo 11/NASA The first human being to walk on another celestial body passed away today. Neil Armstrong, 82, commander Apollo 11 and the first man to set foot on the Moon on 21 July 1969[1], died from "complications resulting from cardiovascular procedures." Photo credit: NASA Neil Armstrong, along with all the other astronauts in the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, was a hero to me. While other kids my age were following baseball, football, and basketball personalities, I was following every astronaut, every space flight, manned and unmanned. I was even following the X-15 flights (as much as was publicaly available at the time). I thought the X-15 was the coolest thing with wings that flew, the start of a real spaceship , the kind of craft that didn't come hurtling back like an uncontrolled ballistic cannonball. Neil Armstrong was an X-15 pilot and the only X-15 pilot to transition to the astronaut program. He would later fly on ...

This is an entry about the Mars Science Laboratory , or MSL, a.k.a. Curiosity. I have absolutely nothing to add to what's already been written. This is instead my little electronic scrapbook section for one of the most exciting space missions since Apollo 11 . Since I live on the east cost in Orlando, I stayed up past my bedtime to watch the video streams from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory located at the California Institute of Technology. Because of the three hour time difference between the two coasts it was 1:31am local Orlando time when Curiosity successfully landed on Mars. I was so happy for the mission command crew when the final successful indicators came down from Mars that Curiosity had safely landed, but nowhere near as elated as they obviously where. I wish I could have been there at least as a witness, a bystander to all the joy and relief they felt that this part of the mission to Mars was successfully concluded. And I was so happy to see indicators from the ...

History was made today when a private spacecraft, Space Exploration Technology Corporation , or SpaceX's Dragon capsule docked with the International Space Station today just before noon local time. It was amazing to watch history unfold in front of me on my computer monitor in near-real-time. I say near-real because of the delay due to the internet streaming the video, as well as the speed of light between the ISS and the earth stations. When I stop to comprehend all that was happening, I realize I was watching video taken aboard the ISS, relayed down to earth, encoded, and then streamed from NASA across the internet to my corporation's network and then finally to my little Dell sitting there in front of me. Complete with audio. And the SpaceX Dragon team was using the same network (although with probably more direction connectivity between their California mission control and NASA) to communicate and control Dragon. All simultaneously with billions of other transactions a...

At about a quarter to 4 in the morning, while I stood outside in my front yard, in my untied sneakers and bathrobe half asleep, the sky lit up on the eastern horizon as the Falcon 9 with the Dragon capsule lifted from Canaveral on its voyage into space and to the ISS. I came quickly to full wakefulness as the horizon brightend, standing and savoring this moment in history. I hadn't felt this excited about any launch since Apollo 11, when I was 15. It's going to be a little while yet before the Dragon docks with the ISS. During that period the spacecraft will go through a complete checkout of its flight systems while on orbit before it's allowed to get close enough to dock. Even if it doesn't get that far, the launch of the Dragon is non-the-less one of the most important events in space history because it was conceived of, funded and built by a private company, SpaceX, and for a fraction of the cost that the conventional aerospace companies would have charged. It...

Well, I tried my little experiment tonight with the "super moon". The two photos, top to bottom, were taken as follows: Top photo, OM 4.5/300mm to MF-1 adapter to Olympus EC-14 to MMF-1 adapter to E-P2, ISO 800 at f/8. Bottom photo, substituting the ZD 50-200mm zoom for the OM 300mm and MF-1 adapter, zoomed to 200mm, ISO 400 at f/8. The air this evening was pretty humid. The light from the full moon was bright enough to see thin clouds scattered across the sky. The images are not as sharp as I've been able to capture in the past due to the high humidity. Best time for this kind of photography is when the humidity is a lot lower, usually in the winter after a front has come through. My thoughts are still divided about keeping the OM 300mm. There was some purple fringing on the edge of the moon, but very minimal, and only if I pixel peeped. It's a shame I can't afford the Olympus 4/3rds SHG 2.8/300mm, but at US$7,000 it's not on my list of must-have camera ge...

There are times when I fail to leave well enough alone. With a mix of older Olympus Zuiko bodies and lenses from the OM era, combined with regular 4/3rds bodies and lenses as well as µ4/3rds gear, I find I can mix and match up some very interesting combinations of bodies and lenses. There will be a super moon tonight, and I wanted to play around a bit with trying to get a large clear image. So I've decided to shoot the moon tonight with an OM 4.5/300mm telephoto lens using an OM-1 adapter, mounted on an EC-14 teleconverter either on the E-3, or else, with an MMF-1 adapter, on the E-P2. The lens and EC-14 combination give me an equivalent 420mm 1:5.6 telephoto lens, which the 4/3rds sensor then multiplies to 840mm (or thereabouts, as the multiplier isn't quite 2x). For testing purposes I chose to use an E-1 body in the back yard because it was lying next to me on my desk when I got this particular wild urge. I was looking to see what kind of detail the whole combination coul...

Now is the end of the month of September. The end of the quarter. Tomorrow is the start of the last quarter of 2011. I saw this new moon early evening, after the sun had gone down, but with plenty of twilight left in the sky. Taken with the E-3, the EC-14, and 50-200mm at maximum zoom (283mm). It was hand-held, or more precisely, hand-propped on the top of my old Sorento. I was surprised at the reasonable sharpness of the image, considering it was taken under less than ideal conditions. The primary black and white treatment was done in Silver Efex Pro 2 to pick out the lunar detail, then the black was tweaked a tiny bit more to get rid of noise artifacts in the black of the sky. Tweaking that black also enhanced the lunar detail a bit more as well. I still have dreams of walking on the moon. I think I always will.

Neil deGrasse Tyson (stage left) is an American astrophysicist, science communicator, the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space, and a Research Associate in the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History. Since 2006 he has hosted the educational science television show NOVA scienceNOW on PBS, and has been a frequent guest on The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and Jeopardy!. He let loose a with a series of tweets today ( @neiltyson ) before the launch of STS 135, Atlantis. I'm going to quote a few of his tweets, and offer my own piquant observations. @neiltyson Many lament the shuttle era's end. But that's misplaced sentiment. Lament instead the absence of an era to replace it. He's absolutely right. As he would go on to tweet, we had Mercury leading directly into Gemini, which then led directly into Apollo and the moon landings. Unfortunately when they stopped Apollo at 17, launched in ...

Another in a near-infinite string of Monday morning commutes down the 408 to work. The mercury hit 90 today, and the air is getting nice and saturated. It's only the second week of April, yet it's feeling like summer already. The lunar terminator is now cutting the moon in half. Mare Imbrium is cut in half, and Mare Vaporum is uncovered. It's interesting that the shadowing around the terminator looks like clouds. I can see why our ancestors thought the moon was like our earth. I wish it were; maybe it would have been a stronger attraction if did have an environment close to our own instead of a hard vacuum and sleeting solar particles. I had another of my crazy recurring dreams the night before. I had somehow gotten a camera flying near the surface of the moon, and was steering it about, looking at craters and mountains. I had strangers standing around me watching and talking. The dream ended the way this dream always ends; I found a hole/cave/tunnel in the lunar surf...

In a week where we faced the melt-down of Wall Street and the death of Paul Newman, it's uplifting (no pun intended) to read that SpaceX 's forth attempt to achieve orbit succeeded. The only stories so far about this success are on Wired and Spaceflight Now . While the launch of the Chinese Shenzhou 7 with the Chinese first-ever space walk is important (especially to the Chinese), what sets Falcon 1 apart from every other rocket of its type to date is that it's privately funded and every element is of new design. And it achieved orbit. My hat is off to the terrific team at SpaceX. May you have even greater successes in the future. Update Another article from Wired: " Space Visionaries Prove Naysayers Wrong — Again " Update 2 It's a success: Valley billionaire launches rocket into orbit Update 3 Here's a more complete article from Spaceflight Now . One additional important milestone was achieved yesterday; the second stage engine re-fired to circularize ...

These come from a website located somewhere in Texas ( www.texasjim.com , but there's no clear link to these pictures on the site), via an email sent to me by my brother. They were supplied to texasjim by his friend's granddaughter . They're from STS -118, Endeavour's August launch. The last picture in the sequence should is Hurricane Dean. Just enjoy the scenery.

STS 117 lifted off from Kennedy this evening, some time after 7:30pm. She was carrying seven astronauts and the second set of solar panels for the IIS. Once those panels are added, the IIS'll have more power capacity and it won't look lop-sided like it does now. After all these years I still find lift-off exhilarating. And there's just something so cool to be able to step outside my front door and look down the street to the horizon and watch spaceships take off. It's like being a character in a Bradbury story. Everything was shot with my Olympus E300, 40-150mm (at 150mm), and hand-held, manual focus and shutter-speed at 1/200. The last shot was made with exposure -2/3 stop down to better pick out the contrail against the evening sky.

Because of possible problems with the launch of Discovery , the Russians have offered to bring the shuttle crew home in three Soyuz spacecraft in January or February if they "work really hard". The Russian's are even thinking of sending the Soyuz to the moon . And all this, with a 40 year old workhorse. It may not be pretty, it may not be big, but it was there to help out the International Space Station when the shuttle fleet was grounded over two years ago, and it's been the ISS' lifeboat because of the failure of NASA to deliver the X38 Crew Return Vehicle . NASA canceled it April 29th, 2002. Because of the limitation of three crew in the Soyuz (not the Soyuz's fault) the crew of the ISS is limited to no more than 3 crew (two since Columbia, as a cosmonaut needs to pilot Soyuz back). As with so many (should I say all?) of the NASA projects, the X38 was cut when the ISS budget hit $5 Billion over budget in February 2002. Now we subtract one number from 38...