Writings

No matter how many times you've seen a Shuttle launch on TV, you are not prepared for the

event in person. This was made even better by being surrounded by fans and enthusiasts of

the US Space program. The only other experience I've had that came close was being at the

Olympics in 2000. But this was more intense, because while I enjoy the Olympics, I dream about space travel.

We arrived at Kennedy Space Center at 3:30am, our scheduled entry time. And set up chairs

and blankets amongst a sea of people, finding a space deep in the crowd. Imagine Woodstock

for science buffs, and you are getting the picture.

From the Kennedy Space Center you can't see the pad directly, as there are a row of trees

in the way. You can however see where the Shuttle would be coming up. As the clouds came in

and out you got a nice bat signal effect.

As dawn broke, most of the planets were visible, as they are all hanging out in the morning

sky. You can see Venus right over the sign, and Jupiter higher up. I also finally saw

Mercury naked eye for the first time, which our horizon up here makes difficult.

The crowd was ready as the sun came up, but we still had hours of wait time at this point.

We passed the time by going on the Shuttle Experience, which was a really great simulation.

As the clock kept moving forward, our MCs for the day kept saying things were looking better

and better for launch. But then again, launches have been scrubbed with 3 seconds to go.

When we came out of the scheduled hold and started from T - 9:00 (where there are no more

scheduled holds) the crowd all leaped to their feet. The energy was amazing. Once we passed

T - 5:00 I started recording, so here is the crowd and launch from my perspective:

The launch happens at 4:30 and you can hear the rumble at about 5:30 (remember the speed of

sound is much slower than the speed of light). Even in its brief visibility, it was amazing.

The moment I first saw that jet come above the trees I was brought to tears. We humans can

do amazing, incredible things, when we bring our collective will together.

So many of my adventures over the last 10 years have been because I met and made such a good and diverse pool of friends while I was at Wesleyan University. These adventures have taken me visiting to Puerto Rico, India, England, and Germany (twice). Next up on this long list of adventures is going to try to see the penultimate shuttle launch, STS-134, starting on Monday. My friend Shoshe, fellow physics major at Wesleyan, stayed with the field and is now working on a PhD in planetary science (i.e. geology of Mars) at Cornell. She and her family had gotten some passes for the launch at Kennedy Space Center, and after various delays, it turned out they had a few more passes than people that could go. She offered one to me, and I jumped at the opportunity. At the end of the day there was even an extra one past that, so Ben's joining as well.

I've got a one way ticket to Orlando, and hotel reservations for the week. There is a launch window every day next week, so that will give us a decent chance to catch the launch, assuming there are no long term mechanical failures like the last delay. Very much looking forward to this adventure, and I'll be sure to post pictures once it's over.

I knew that Airline pricing was pretty crazy, but I didn't realize it was this crazy:

Passengers flying to or from airports that are dominated by a single carrier — like Memphis, Newark or Dallas/Fort Worth — pay fares 20 or 30 percent higher than at non-hub airports. The prices are even more inflated when you’re flying from a smaller city with a limited number of flights. A nonstop one-way ticket from Des Moines to Dallas/Fort Worth is $375 onAmerican Airlines, for example — more than the $335 Delta will charge you to fly from Miami to Anchorage. But what happens when you’re interested in flying American from Des Moines to Los Angeles, which hosts a more competitive airport? That flight is only about half the price ($186), despite its being more than double the distance. Now, here’s the trick: American flights from Des Moines to L.A. have a layover in Dallas. If you want to travel to Dallas, the best way to get a reasonable fare is to book the flight to Los Angeles instead, and simply get off the plane at Dallas.

There is an article on NY Times with a great graphic showing route comparisons. I wonder if this becomes enough of a thing, how the airlines will react.

I really love my Kindle, and I'm happy I bought it. I haven't completely given up on real books though. One of the reasons why is evident below:

This is not a new book, it's a year and a half old. The Kindle price is higher than a brand new hardcover. This isn't actually Amazon's fault, the price here was set by the publisher. If Amazon had it's druthers all these ebooks would be $9.99 or less (and they were until they lost that fight with publishers).

I'll probably read this book, but I won't buy it for the kindle. I'll either get this from the Library or buy a used hardcover which I can then give to my parents as reading material. No incremental revenue to publishers, no additional sales.

A couple years ago I briefly got back into table top gaming, building up a Blood Bowl collection, and gathering up all my old RPG books and games from attic storage up in Vermont. It was a fun summer/fall, but less people got into it than I hoped, and at the end of the day it became another thing I had to organize (I have way too many things on that list). After a year boxed up it's time to let that hobby go to make space for a Solar Telescope.

I've started posting the Blood Bowl teams up on ebay (lots more to come, including some of the 1st ed stuff I bought back in the early 90s). There are also a whole bunch of 1st and 2nd ED AD&D books that I'll get around to posting over the next couple of weeks, and some other random bits of games. If any of that is of interest to anyone, feel free to let me know.

This past weekend was the North East Astronomy Forum, which is one of the biggest Amateur Astronomy gatherings in the US, and definitely the biggest anywhere that I could get by car. A 2 day event with 140 vendors in Suffern NY.

My shopping list this year was limited, but the one thing I really needed was a new focuser. After wandering around and trying out various options for feel, I ended up picking up the moonlight 2 speed. An hour on Sunday morning to install it and recolumnate the telescope, and now I'm just waiting for the skies to clear so I can test it (the forecast looks like it will be a while until that happens).

Red is their signature color, and definitely makes my scope look like a transformer now.

Recently at work I got a question about tools that our project uses. I get these sorts of questions at various times somewhat regularly for a number of reasons. As a responsible answering party I asked what the context of the question was. And, this time got no response, which means that my answer was probably crap.

When someone asks you to explain the context of your question, they could very well be saying "go away, I don't want to deal with you". But just as frequently they could actually be trying to communicate with you and give you an answer that they know you'll get something out of. A snap answer is almost always wrong because the context and head space you came up with your question is going to be an entirely different head space that the person you are asking has been in all day/week/month or even forever. Communication, real communication, not waiting for your turn to speak, is what happens when two or more people extend their frame of reference to try to overlap so they can actually see what's going on in the other's head.

It frustrates me to give a useless, or worse, a bad answer because I couldn't draw out more information about the question. Fortunately it happens rarely enough that I still get riled up about it, like today.

After both of our Astronomy outreach events at Vassar I've gotten comments from folks that we should have a sign out at the main street to direct people into the event (which also might bring in folks that didn't know about it.) This struck me as a great chance to look into using EL Wire.

EL Wire is what they used in the new Tron movie to make the distinctive look on people's clothing. In the old tron the glow was post processing, in the new one it was actually there. EL Wire only glows blue/green, but through the use of colored sheaths you can get different hues. EL Wire runs at 100 Volts, 1000 Hhz, though with such little amperage that you can make an inverter that supports about 3m of wire that will run off 2 AA batteries.

So I bought some EL Wire in "red" to see about making a sign. I got 2 9 ft lengths (which turned out to be a good guess on length) that already had inverters on them. With some scotch and electrical tape I did a quick test to see if I could write out STAR PARTY with an arrow.   I considered the test successful, so I decided the next step was to paint the plywood black, and instead of using masking, actually drill through the plywood to make the lines.

It turns out that there is enough friction to hold the straight lines without any worries, but the loops on the Rs, P, and S need some help, so scotch tape to the rescue there just to hold it in place.

The final result with the lights off an illuminated:

It's not so much red as orange, but as an indicator sign this should work out well for our events. It also made for a great little weekend project.

All bundled up at the Saturn Watch event (flannel lined jeans are excellent for star gazing) showing people the views through my telescope.