Old TVs, new Spot, Old Rocket, and Moon Pictures

Inspired by a comment from The Thomas, here is an article about the a working 1936 TV in the UK. Let that be a challenge to you! I was amused by the fact that it only had one channel because there was only a single (state owned) station in the entire UK, so it needs two converters to get over-the-air transmissions, and by the comments from the grandson of John Logie Baird (UK television inventor). I knew him from an old book (something about "electrons go to work") in my collection.

The article also has an extensive comments section, where various people posted the ancient things they have that still work. Reminds me of the refrigerator my parents have in the old house, which I think is older than I am.

Other news of note includes a new "spot" on Jupiter (possibly from an impact, but a "dark mark" could come from a Death Eater attack), and some older followup stories about Apollo:

• Restoring the Saturn V in Houston, which is made up of parts of two rockets built for canceled moon missions (first stage of #514, whose other two stages are at Kennedy Space Center, the second stage of #515, and the third stage of #513, which Wiki says was surplus when #513 became the Skylab booster).
• News story about the LRO pictures of the Apollo landing sites that I wrote about in a previous blog.
• Link to the NASA page with the LRO pictures, which includes links to the full-size images like the one Astroprof posted. I can't get over how close Apollo 16 was to the edge of a crater!

The NASA article gives important details on the resolution per pixel (about four feet) and how the long shadow (due to a low sun angle) makes it easier to spot the lander. Imagine what we will see when the resolution improves by more than a factor of 2 after they circularize the LRO orbit later this year!

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Man on the Moon

We can pretend I was live-blogging this one (40 years ago), but I am sure the posting time for this picture is about 5 or 10 minutes too early.

Armstrong stepped off the Lem around 11 PM EDT on 20 July 1969 (Wiki says he stepped on the moon at 10:56 pm EDT), and we were watching it live on TV, on CBS. I'm pretty sure it was our old Motorola Quasar b/w television (right Bro?). Aldrin followed about 15 minutes later, after Armstrong had picked up a quick rock sample, and then the TV camera was moved to a tripod where it would view the landing area.

At some point I set up my dad's old Ricoh SLR on a tripod and, guessing at the exposure, took one picture on color slide film to record this moment of history - with both astronauts on the moon with the LM. This is that image:

Special thanks to my brother for borrowing the slide from my parents and scanning it for me so I could include it here today. (He says the picture itself is much better than this indicates, and suspects his scanner's bulb is fading. Apparently you can also see the TV tuner, etc in the original slide.) Maybe I'll get a chance to try it on my own scanner one of these months.

You can click on the image for a slightly larger version but, as I say, it is really not of archival quality. I've smoothed and resized the original scan to get rid of various scanning artifacts, which also hides somewhat the rasters of the TV image itself that are in the original.

That was a really memorable day, with the landing on the moon in the afternoon and then a long wait into the evening to see the moon walk. I don't remember staying up past midnight to see the entire 2+ hour effort, but that first hour was simply amazing ... particularly the way they moved in the reduced gravity of the moon.

But perhaps the most amazing thing was that we had live television from the moon, even if it had to be a special "slow scan" system to fit in the available bandwidth. I had grown up with the Space Race, watching launches live on TV in elementary school, so it was easy to take a lot of this for granted. However, my grandfather had grown up before radio, and lived to see live TV from the moon. Never underestimate what the future can hold.

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History Channel ... Epic Fail

They hacked up the CBS broadcast pretty badly, putting very little of the landing coverage in the program, although the "first step" part was fantastic.

Their program "Moonshot" stinks. I'll never watch that turkey again.

In contrast, TCM's showing of "For All Mankind" (1989) is a keeper.

Sadly, they re-edit the audio/video sync of the first step so it matches the point when Neil Armstrong drops down from the ladder to the lander footpad for the SECOND time rather than when he steps off of the pad some 30 seconds later, but most of it puts a premium on real film and video with voice-over commentary - mostly from those involved in the mission.

Few "recreations". The actual astronauts getting dressed, not some actors like in "Moonshot", and certainly no fake dinner at home with the astronaut's parents.

The best part of "For All Mankind" might be the very beginning, where they play ALL of Kennedy's speech about going to the moon. I had no idea he went into such detail about the challenges that project would face.

However, the very best part is the high resolution film looking out during launches from the moon, where you can see the entire landing site (with instruments and tracks on the surface) as they pull away. Ditto for images of the Apollo 11 landing, which were much higher resolution than I have seen before.

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Revisiting the Moon Landing

I've decided not to jump the gun like so many news stories, and hold off on posting my personal photo of the moon walk until roughly the anniversary of when it was taken (about quarter after 11 EDT on the night of 20 July). Today I will just reflect on the events themselves and some articles I feel are worth mentioning.

Looking back, we knew what was going to happen, in detail. Maybe in more detail than you can find in all of the Wiki articles put together, because we had been raised on the space program. We (meaning my brother and I) had read every National Geographic article about moon missions going back to the first high-resolution pictures taken by Ranger 7. And we had read everything in Popular Science, books, Life magazine, you name it.

In addition, there had already been several missions to the moon, and the dangers were clear. We had seen plenty of launch attempts fail in the early days, so we knew every launch was dangerous. We had seen quite a few early moon missions actually miss the moon, so we knew navigation was not a trivial detail. We knew the rocket on the Service Module had to work correctly several times. Once you slowed into orbit around the moon, you were stuck there unless it fired. We knew there was a very narrow window for reentry. You didn't aim for the earth, you aimed at the edge of the earth to just barely catch the atmosphere. Too little and you skipped off into oblivion, too much and you would be crushed by the g forces. And we knew that there was a lot of kinetic energy to burn off by the heat shield, because you were coming in at 25,000 miles per hour.

Worse, we knew that both the descent and, in particular, ascent engines on the LM had to work or you would be stuck on the moon - leaving one man to go home alone. And, unlike the main engine (which was used for mid-course corrections), that ascent engine was never tested. Sure, they had used one on Apollo 10 when the LM had descended to less than 10 miles above the moon, but that was a different spacecraft. You had one shot to get home.

Best of all, it was summer. We knew when it was going to happen and we could watch it all as it happened. It was like riding along with Columbus to the New World. And that is what we did, went along for the ride via television.

One news item out there that I really enjoyed was this Audio slide show from the BBC. The music is from the top songs at that time: "In the year 25-25", "Age of Aquarius", and "Something in the Air". However, the newsman narrating is wrong about just how much chance was involved in the selection of Armstrong for that flight. The only way he would have missed is if an earlier mission had failed in its objectives, and even then one suspects that the crews might have shifted so he was flying the LM with the same skill that he showed flying an X-15.

Another news item of note was this video interview with a self-styled beatnik who programmed the computers on the Apollo mission. I'll bet The Thomas will enjoy this, with its discussion of worrying about every byte of code that had to be squeezed into that box, even more than I did. No bloatware back then!

Videos and pictures:
I suppose everyone has seen the partial set of cleaned up video (BBC version here), but I'll also link in my blog from last year that includes comments about the edits of the audio-video sync (concerning Armstrong's jump down, up, and then down again) in many of the older "first step" versions out there. By the way, the picture I will post on 20 July was taken just a bit after the part shown at the 3:00 mark of the first YouTube video.

For that matter, I think the coolest photo of all isn't on the moon, it is this one of Neil Armstrong doing his best Jack Nicholson impression after returning to the LM after walking on the moon. That look of tired joy, and the twinkle in his eye, says more than his words did.

Side remark:
The one thing I would like to see that has never been on any program is a side-by-side comparison of the Saturn launch to the moon and a Space Shuttle launch. The Saturn just crawls off of the pad. Why? The shuttle has a thrust to weight-at-launch ratio of 6.8 to 4.5 (in millions of pounds) while the Apollo rocket had a ratio of 7.6 to 6.7. Apollo didn't get going until it had burned off a lot of fuel from the first stage. A friend who watched them all as a kid was stunned when he saw the first Shuttle launch. It went up like an Estes rocket, and the roll maneuver it did early in flight looked like one of those early rockets just before they blew up.

Cranks and crackpots:
I really enjoyed some of the articles about the silly people who think a friend of mine (who witnessed the launch in person) and even the Soviets (who tracked the mission and congratulated us on kicking their butts in the biggest competition of the entire Cold War) were pathological liars and/or part of a conspiracy to fake the landing. Matt laid out part of the answer to some complaints, but posted a few days before new photos (pointed out by Astroprof) showed up that allow us to see the base of the LM at the Apollo 11 landing site. Even better, the LRO photos also include a cool image of the Apollo 14 site where you can see the disturbed lunar dirt (I was going to write "earth"!) where the astronauts hiked back and forth to set up a science experiment. However, as a BBC article explains, they won't get the resolution down to 50 cm per pixel (twice what is in the images linked above and shown in Astroprof's article) until August. They will eventually orbit even lower, giving sharper images for the reasons Matt explained, but that will be some time next year.

One thing those cranks never deal with is the 3 foot jump needed to get up on the ladder to get back in the LM. If you were faking it you would have steps all the way down. No one, not even a basketball star, could do a 36" vertical jump with all of that equipment on in full gravity, but it is easy in 1/6 gravity. And why the big gap? The legs on the LM were collapsible, to take up the impact when they shut off the engine and dropped the last meter or two to the moon. The ladder could not go all the way down; it had to allow for the possible compression of the lander legs.

PS - Every news feed has their version of this info, but CBS deserves mention because their video archives helped make up for the landing videos that NASA destroyed or simply lost. I like the BBC versions because they seem to provide better bandwidth, particularly for video.

UPDATED:
Here is today's story about Pres Obama honoring the Apollo 11 astronauts. The sidebar has a number of additional new stories related to the 40th anniversary of the landing.

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Russian Space Station Plans

According to this very interesting article, Russia is planning to take a very different long-term approach to space exploration than the US. Rather than abandoning and destroying the International Space Station in just 6 years from now, perhaps 10 years in the more optimistic scenario, they want to reconfigure the Russian modules and use them as the basis for a long-term space-based construction site.

This is not much of a surprise, really. The US kept the first multi-crew space station (Skylab) manned for about half of a year, then watched as its orbit decayed - crashing back to earth about 5 years later - because we had no ability to launch a spacecraft to maintain it. We shifted all of our (limited) resources to the Shuttle, which could have done the job it it had not been delayed by several years.

We have a short attention span, jumping from one project to another. Our next one is a direct return to the moon. Building that next launch vehicle will surely have so many delays that we won't be able to get back to ISS even if we wanted to. Its continued operation into the next decade will be a result of vehicles built and operated by others.

Russia, on the other hand, kept Mir in use for more than a decade, learning how to maintain a space station over a long period of time. Their plan is to let the US decouple all of its modules and destroy them, using a new junction module (needed because the current junction modules belong to the US) to assemble the Russian components into a station that might become the first "space dock".

From the end of this article:

Unlike the ISS, which was advertised primarily as a platform for scientific research, Russia's future space station, dubbed the Orbital Piloted Assembly and Experiment Complex (OPSEK) would have the primary goal of supporting deep space exploration.

Behind the scenes, Russian engineers have drawn up ambitious plans for orbital stations around the Earth and the Moon, and eventually in the orbit of Mars. These would be linked by re-usable tugs, shuttling between them continuously to support the sustained exploration of the Solar System.

After separation from rest of the ISS, the station's 20-tonne service module could eventually be replaced by a 40-tonne living quarters launched by a new family of launch vehicles.

In turn, this module could ultimately serve as a construction site and a base for the Martian expedition complex, which could be assembled in Earth orbit in the mid-2030s to carry the first humans to the Red Planet.

Very interesting.

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Christmas Eve in 1968.

This is the 40th anniversary of Apollo 8 putting men in orbit around the moon for the first time - and sending back images of Earthrise.

I suppose everyone has seen the color photo they took, but today's BBC article about the event includes the FIRST photograph taken of Earthrise by humans:

My version has been cropped from the 2411x2448 original available from NASA on the flight journal page describing this observation. The picture is in black and white because that is the film they had in the camera at the time, and is oriented the way NASA says Bill Anders said it looked to him from orbit. They were taking geology-oriented images of the moon, where color was not relevant. The iconic color photo was taken shortly after. A transcript of the hunt for color film and large versions of the two color photos are also on that NASA web page.


The BBC article also includes a low-def version of an HD video of Earthrise shot recently by a Japanese satellite and the first photo of the earth taken from lunar orbit.

Finally, one thing that is forever memorable: Live TV from the moon. The actual broadcast was a boring black and white image. What you might have seen later is that audio synced with the color film that was shot from orbit (see this video, for example) but only seen after they returned to earth.

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Full Moon

The moon has been very bright lately, rivaling a nearby streetlight even when not full. (I could read the labels on our recycling bin by moonlight last week.) I learned one of the reasons today: Tonight's brilliant full moon coincides with the moon's closest approach to the earth in its elliptical orbit around the earth, making it 14% bigger and 30% brighter than usual.

It was definitely time to get out the camera.


Click image for larger view. Details below the fold.

Photo taken with a Nikon D70 using a 70-300 lens at full zoom (300 mm), shot at f5.6 at 1/2000 of a second exposure with sensitivity set to 800 ISO. Only edit was to crop to 500x500 and convert to greyscale, although I did not see any color artifacts (probably because the sensors were not being pushed anywhere near their limit at that exposure).

I can't get over the detail for a photo with a fairly modest lens, particularly the mountains visible along the upper right edge. It took a lot of experiments with the camera set to shutter priority to figure out what appeared to give the best image. The ones shot at 1/8000 didn't have enough brightness in the ejecta, while slower ones brought out the halo (the sky is actually fairly hazy with humidity) while losing all of the detail on the surface.

OK, enough of a diversion. Time to get back to grading exams.

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Space news

Two news stories today:

• Black hole confirmed at center of Milky Way
• Water vapor in vicinity of an extra-solar planet

The first is not really new news, but the second one is interesting. The planet involved is not suitable for life, but the discovery increases the odds that the conditions for life might exist in other solar systems.

Having actual data on this is relevant to estimates made based on the so-called Drake Equation (for details, look here). Most of the values in that estimate were, basically, wild guesses. The most critical one is the chance that a planet can support life. Data on the odds of finding water available are, therefore, interesting to the SETI community.

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RIP - Phoenix Lander and Miriam Makeba

Two obituaries today: Miriam Makeba, who brought "world music" to the west along with her arguments against apartheid, before either was particularly fashionable (indeed, while it was still illegal for blacks and whites to marry in many states in the US), and the Phoenix Lander that has brought us an amazing vision of Mars.

I'll put the inanimate Phoenix below the fold and start with Miriam Makeba singing "When I've Passed On" (circa 1966), which seems eerily suitable for today:

You should click through and look at some of the related videos ("The Click Song" and "Pata Pata" are her famous ones) if you are not familiar with her African music. Along with Hugh Masekela, she brought South African music to the US (and the world) in the mid 60s. It amazed me when I read that she still performing at 76. This video is one of a set recorded in Stockholm. She is backed by musicians from St. Thomas, the US, and Brazil. (Obligatory Wiki link is here. Bonus question at the bottom for any young folks who know who her husband, Stokely Carmichael, was.)

The Phoenix Lander on Mars

I written about Phoenix before, and have been meaning to come back to it to point out some of the amazing things it has seen since it slipped off of the national media spotlight. (Between the election and the attention span of the US media, even seeing weather on Mars never had a chance.)

There is a wonderful collection of images and related stories (along with lots of other information) on the Phoenix Lander web site. I'll select a few ? of my favorites here:

• What to put first? Ice clouds moving across the sky, a movie that totally blew me away the first time I saw it.
• That video is followed closely by this one of nighttime clouds (are those stars?) moving across the sky.
• A photo sequence of moving clouds is not nearly as good as the first, but makes you think you are out in your Martian backyard on a nice -118F (-83 C) afternoon.
• Then there was the frost on a cool fall morning, in a picture that is stunningly beautiful
• There is another picture of frost, not nearly as good, but they also have lidar data showing snow falling!
• That would be impressive enough, but there is also photo sequence of a dust devil moving across the horizon
• There are also two very clear photos of a dust devil, here and here
• Finally, there are time-lapse images of sunrise on Mars and a nice still photo of one of sunrise on the 90th day of the mission.

It was supposed to be a 90-day mission, ending on August 25th. Apparently they got regular reports until the end of October when low power caused the lander to go into a hibernation mode and have had only minimal communications through November 2.

You can read today's wrap-up news release here.

Not bad for a government project ...

Special bonus question:
Compare and contrast the apparent re-election of Sen. Ted Stevens to the election of Adam Clayton Powell to fill the seat vacated when he was thrown out of the House of Representatives for corruption. There is a pair for you!

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Magnetic Movie

Here is something for Matt's Physics 2 students studying magnetism ...



There is a question below the fold; only look at the question after you watch the video. [BTW, the list of what YouTube considers "related" to this video is a really mixed bag!]

I spotted this 'featured video' when I went looking to see if "Physicists Gone Wild!" from tonight's rerun of The Big Bang Theory was actually on YouTube. Of course it is, but the network people didn't put it there. Stupid network people. They just don't get this new inter-tube stuff.

The question: Did you try to figure out whether those were real fields and how they were being produced? Then you might be a physicist. Looks like a lot of the comments came from people who thought it was all real after watching the whole thing!

(To me they appear to be computer simulations of fields like those found in stars or galaxies, superimposed on various lab settings by very clever film makers. The one they started with, which looks like it might be the sun, almost looks like a huge bit of ball lightning you might try to make in the lab. See side note below.)

A very nice movie, aesthetically interesting with some good physics here and there if you look closely. I really liked the realization of helical motion of charged particles around magnetic field lines, like what is responsible for the aurora and trapping charged particles in the Van Allen Belt. I should take a few minutes this fall to emphasize this connection between physics and astrophysics.

Side note 1: Ball Lightning
Making ball lightning on a small scale, here and here, looks like a lot of fun. So do the ones made in a microwave, but I don't have a microwave I feel like toasting. Having microwaved a few CDs, I can almost smell the burning case and Li-ion battery of the iPhone someone microwaved in a related video. BTW, I don't think a claw hammer is the Apple-approved way of opening up an iPhone. Clearly a future physicist. An engineer would use a screwdriver as a chisel.)

Side note 2: Unrelated time-wasting discovery
How could I not know about skeet fishing? [Why you want to look: The guy is 'shooting' down clay pigeons with a fishing rod. That is hard enough with a shotgun! Another video makes it clear he has a casting plug on the line, so it makes sense that it has enough energy to break a clay pigeon. He has no trouble breaking an egg.]

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39 Years ...

Today is the 39th anniversary of the first moon landing by Armstrong and Aldrin in the "Eagle" LEM, at 4:17:40 EDT during the Apollo 11 mission.

Click here for a wav file of the landing announcement.

The "first step" and the moon walk started late that night.

Somewhere in my Dad's slide box is the picture I took of the TV screen at about the moment he stepped off of the pad onto the moon. It remains unforgettable today.

The video clip above is really nice in that it shows Aldrin coming down the ladder and testing the drop (and 36"+ vertical leap in 1/6 gravity) between the bottom step and the ground at about the 2:00 mark. Watching this, it would seem that Armstrong had already finished the same test before the 0:30 mark despite the audio that comes after it: "OK, I just checked ah gettin back up to that first step." The audio and video are not correctly correlated at this point in the video clip. (See below for correct audio.) The sync is correct later in this video clip.

There is another clip available on YouTube that was not AFAIK broadcast. This is looking down the ladder from (inside?) the LEM and starts about a minute earlier than the clip shown above. This audio is different, since it includes a message to Aldrin about adjusting the aperture on this camera (the "sequence camera"), which improves the image quality at 1:40 into the clip. This clip also shows that the audio in the clip shown up above has been editted, because the comment about seeing Armstrong and his testing the first step is earlier, before the top clip even starts (you can see him go down, up, then finally jump down onto the pad at about 1:14, which is where the other clip starts).

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Mars has Dirt!

Not to be trite, but some of the headlines and quotes have been amusing. "You might be able to grow asparagus in it." What makes this important is that there was no guarantee that the geology on Mars would produce anything like the mix of ingredients we find on earth. Just look at our Moon, which allegedly comes from the same crustal material we farm here on Earth. As emphasized in the BBC story and one from CNN linked below, the soil is mildly alkaline. Bad for azaleas and citrus, but great for lots of other plants and containing the trace elements useful for simple cellular life forms on earth.

(By the way, if you want a clickable image for a high resolution look at the "clumps of rosy red soil", you should use the ones on the main Phoenix news site. You can also follow Phoenix's exploits on its Twitter page.)

Buried in some stories of this important discovery (but prominent in the MSNBC story, which links to a nice little article on space.com) is the HOW it was done. Wet chemistry on another planet!

Hey, it is hard enough to do wet chemistry in an intro chemistry lab!

I am really impressed with the work of what I assume is a team of analytical chemists (the folks who focus on developing instrumentation) from my limited knowledge through a grad school friend who is an analytical chem PhD working in the medical field.

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Ice on Mars - Update

(Followup to an earlier article from the end of May.) NASA is now reporting visual evidence of ice on Mars.

I don't know why some in the media chose the pictures they did, but the best ones among the various pictures available in the JPL Phoenix News photo collection are linked here:

• An animation showing a before/after comparison of two photos illustrates the disappearance of many small chunks of material over four days by calling your attention to the changes.
• A side-by-side display of color images of the same trench, with an enlarged inset showing the chunks, shows that these chunks are white in color.

Very striking.

The key phenomenon here is sublimation, where a solid turns directly into a gas without going through a liquid phase. This is what CO₂ (carbon dioxide, which is "dry ice" in its solid form below -78 C or 195 K) does on earth, and also how snow "dries out" and becomes extremely light powder in places that have low humdity yet are well below freezing. The reverse process, deposition, is the way that frost forms on a cold surface without any liquid water being involved.

The important data we need to interpret these observations are given in the weather report for Mars. The atmospheric pressure is 8.5 millibars (0.1 psi) while the temperature varies from -80 C (193 K) at night to -30 C (243 K) during the day. At this low pressure, CO₂ is a gas across this entire temperature range. (That is why the polar "dry ice" cap has vanished in this location during the Martian summer.) If the white material was dry ice, it would rapidly turn to gas between when the trench was dug and when the photo was taken. If it is salt, it would not sublime. The best candidate is water. Water is a solid at these temperatures and would sublimate slowly, just like when clothes are hung out to dry in the winter.

News stories:
The best article is in the New Scientist. The BBC has a good story on this, as does MSNBC (with a good picture choice), while CNN only blogs it with an irrelevant photo of the sampler to illustrate nothing.

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Ice on Mars? !

I was wondering, one week ago, just how momentous the landing of Phoenix on Mars might turn out to be.

The news today suggests that it could be better than anyone hoped.

Could there really be a layer of ice, basically a frozen lake, directly under the lander? That picture is simply amazing. (The JPL new release about it can be read here.) It not only looks like dirt was blown off of the ice by the lander engines, the one area off to the back right, also seen in an earlier image, almost looks like it might be meltwater running off from the exposed area.

By the way, use this link to the JPL picture archive to keep up on the images released to the press. In addition, Astroprof has had several good articles about Mars and the landing in the past week. Check them out.

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Mars

The success of the Phoenix Mars Lander so far is extremely exciting. I guess it will be a week or so before they get the results of the first soil sample, so we just need to be patient.

FYI, there is an excellent article about the first pictures that includes a composite look out toward the horizon and explains (with an example) why the pattern on the surface is indicative of permafrost. Much better than anything I ran across on the news coverage over the weekend, which was pretty thin. Thanks to a comment added to Chad's article for a pointer to Jeff Marlow's observations.

Maybe the coverage was kind of thin because the press were expecting to see snow drifts.

Of course, maybe we will be lucky and the craft will last long enough for us to see the arrival of Martian winter! We can dream, can't we?

For now, my amateur comment is that it is exciting just to see differences in geology at the fine scale possible only in photographs. It is one thing to see color coded maps, and quite another to see a picture. The absence of craters and other striking "space" features is the clearest evidence of all that there are forces (such as freeze-thaw cycles involving water) at work on the surface of Mars.

I was also impressed with how well the systems worked. I was mentally estimating the velocity as they made altitude calls, just like when I "watched" the first moon landing, and I was elated when it was clear that it was going to work. I was also no longer wondering about site contamination by the rocket landing after a bit of a brush-up on the chemistry of hydrazine as used as here: a monopropellant with only ammonia (NH3), nitrogen, and hydrogen gas as the products. Ditto when the hydrazine was vented after landing. Nothing there that will leave any water behind.

Some other nice info is in a pair of articles by Astroprof. The first one includes a picture, "So Few Rocks", that was the winner in a contest to speculate on what will be seen. It is remarkably close to what was actually seen!

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Live Events Sunday

Formula 1 Monaco Grand Prix in Monte Carlo (roll off at 8:00 AM EDT, no matter what, rain or shine) live on SPEED TV.

Indy 500 in (well, adjacent to) Indianapolis (start engines scheduled for 1:03 pm EDT, weather permitting) live on ABC TV.

NASCAR Coca-Cola 600 in Charlotte (race start around 6pm? EDT ... they are not nearly as punctual as F1, and also are are afraid of rain) live on FOX

and last, but not least

Phoenix Mars Lander on the surface near the north pole of Mars (about 7:53 pm EDT "earth receive time") live on NASA TV starting about 6 PM EDT (available on the web), with first images possible circa 10 pm EDT that would be shown at a press conference scheduled for midnight EDT.

One of these could very well be a unique event in the history of mankind.

OK, it could be Danica Patrick winning the Indy 500, but we can hope that it will be a confirmation of the presence of frozen water on the arctic plain near the north pole of Mars. (Some info is on the NASA web site, and I am expecting astroprof and others to provide lots of info as it becomes available.)

Why "earth receive time"? It takes over 15 minutes for a radio signal to travel (at the speed of light) from Mars to the Earth. Since events like entry into the atmosphere and landing will be logged when the radio signals reach Earth, it only makes sense to use the time when we know it happened rather that the "Mars Standard Time" when it actually happened.

This distinction is one of the important results of the 'Theory' of Special Relativity as regards the seemingly simple question of when two things happen "at the same time". See the physics FAQ for lots of good stuff.

PS -
For something that happened a long time ago, but is just now being watched in real time, check out the article about observations of a Type 1b supernova that I picked out of Chad's daily list-o-links. (It is so nice to have someone else pick through a massive RSS feed and select a few tasty morsels that might be worth looking at.

[Personal highlight of that article: a reminder that astronomers still use the tiny, deprecated, cgs "erg" rather than the bigger, SI standard, "joule" for energies on a galactic scale. Instead of 10⁵¹ erg, why not 10⁴⁴ J or, better yet, 10²⁰ YJ. After all, there were a lotta Yotta joules in that explosion!]

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Aliens are My Brother?

No, not that brother. The generic Biblical one.

The title of this post is the same as the one written by a Vatican astronomer who claims that a search for life on Mars, or even SETI, is acceptable because G*d could have created life on other planets.

The short article raises a few semi-serious questions.

If life on other planets falls into the category of "brother", then do all other forms of life on earth fall into that protected category? That would move the Catholic Church deep into the territory of PETA and general tree-hugger environmentalism, which is wildly at odds with their implicit endorsement of neo-con Republicans by actively opposing environmentalist Democrats via single-issue politics.

Does this imply that sentient life on other planets would have souls, and that Christ would have had to be incarnated there to save those souls? If so, that would cause some complications for doctrinal opposition to the claims of Mormons ... unless its done on a one-visit-per-planet basis. OK, so no real problem there, and a good reason for the Church to build missionary rockets just to be sure.

The comment about the possibility that aliens might be free from original sin was especially interesting. My view has long been that Original Sin is code for the animal instincts that remain in our genetic wiring as a result of the way evolution works, what Freud called the Id. How could an alien not have to deal with a similar life history?

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Much Better ISS Photo

Learn from your mistakes! This photo was taken tonight as the International Space Station went overhead. Two other pictures and a detail frame (explaining that the dashed effect at the start of the track is an artifact of manually releasing the shutter) are below the fold. Click the picture to see a larger version.


All photos were taken with speed set to ISO 200 (twilight sky is no longer so overexposed) and manual exposure for 10 seconds. The picture above was with the lens at 18 mm and f3.5 for two reasons: to wide the view to include the tree, and because it was really moving fast as it went overhead. Other than reducing the size by a factor of three, only modest Photoshop adjustments were needed to darken the sky.

An earlier picture, shown below, was made with the lens zoomed to 70 mm and f4.5.


The frame below, cropped from the original picture and shown without resizing, shows a detail of the dashed part of the track.


You can clearly see the spiral motion as the camera undergoes damped simple harmonic motion after I pressed the shutter and let go of the camera. Final lesson is that I need to plan better and dig out the remote shutter release to get rid of that junk.

A later picture, shot with 18mm like the one at the top, shows the ISS heading for the horizon and the lovely urban landscape of power and cable TV wires.



Other technical details: There was no need to work from the raw files when processing these pictures. Other than resizing, the only thing I did was use the manual levels control in Photoshop to darken the sky and improve contrast. Moving it to about 0.70, which was near the bottom of the lowest histogram peak, gave what you see here. (Using autolevels would brighten the sky, making it look like daylight, as shown in one of the modifications to yesterday's single photograph.)

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Crappy Space Station Photo

I now know I can do better, as this was not exactly thought out, but I figured I would post it anyway just to show that it can be done ... and to record the always awesome experience of seeing the space station and the shuttle go overhead. The photo was made on the spur of the moment. Technical nonsense is all below the fold. Click on the image to see all of it.



The squiggly lines are a sort-of-double exposure of the Space Station flying over our house tonight. It is really one very long exposure, but there are two tracks (and two trees and two power lines) because I moved the camera during the exposure.

Given the lighting conditions (there was a sodium vapor street light on the power pole that is in the lower left corner of the frame), this is actually quite amazing. This picture resulted from some significant tweaks of the Nikon raw image and has been resized by a factor of 4 from the original to save on disk space and bandwidth and to smear out the artifacts of a long exposure at low light levels.

We also saw the Space Shuttle, which was about 20 seconds behind, but did not even try to get a picture since (a) it was quite a bit dimmer and (b) I didn't think this one had turned out.

The original was a real hack photo, but I figured I'd post the mistakes in case anyone wants to learn from them. It was taken with a Nikon D70 and a 70 mm lens with aperture priority !! forcing it wide open at 4.5. As stated above, we were just out in the street around the corner from our house where we had a good view of the track, which was only 20-something degrees above the horizon. Unfortunately, the view through a gap in the trees was over a street light. Fortunately, the ISS is pretty bright and software can perform miracles.

Mistake 1: I completely forgot to bump up the ISO from 400. Not sure if that made it worse or better, given the original camera image below. I actually don't think I would change it to a higher setting unless I had a better sky (like we had for the lunar eclipse). Mistake 2: Using aperture priority. Little did I know that the exposure time would go to infinity in this case! The jiggles are because I kept my hand on it, figuring it would need to be fired again every few seconds. Nope. Stayed open. I moved the camera after 5 seconds or so (guessing, because there was nothing to see through the SLR), and finally realized that the only way to close the shutter would be to turn the camera off. Next time I will use the manual setting and find the remote so I can leave the stupid thing alone.

What worked: Post processing. The image above is the result of starting from the raw file (the NEF raw data from the digital sensors) and pushing the color temperature way down (to about 2300) and tweaking the tint about 20%, using the color of the tree leaves as a clue. (You can see a lot more color detail, and noise, in the 6 Mbyte version.) I had first tried the tungsten presets, but that was not enough to kill off the effect of the sodium vapor light illuminating the tree (and all the other ones polluting the city sky). This is quite an improvement over what the camera showed me in the preview window and dumped into the basic jpeg file:



Yeah, that is really horrible. Nothing but sodium yellow and a bunch of lines. Suprisingly, one can do almost as good as the raw file edit just by hitting the Auto Levels adjustment in Photoshop. That gave the result below, which really shows the doubly-exposed tree rather well but leaves the power line yellow from the street light and still shows the track of the space station.



Both of these pictures are tiny (reduced by a factor of 8 from the original) since they don't actually contain any additional information. They do, however, show that what looked like a dark sky isn't even close to being dark!

Closing comment.
When I say "always awesome", I mean just as awesome as when I saw Echo go overhead. When I called my parents to tell them that there were some really good ISS viewing opportunities this week, my Dad said "The first satellite I ever saw was Echo". Me too. I was standing right next to him at the time.

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Earth as seen from Mars

There is a fantastic picture of Earth and its moon over on Astroprof's blog from 12 March. The picture was taken from Mars by the MRO. Go to his blog for details.

Also check out the picture of Enceladus and other info from the latest observations from Cassini, in a post from 11 March.

I find the picture from Mars extremely interesting, since it shows what an advanced civilization there (not to be confused with the one from Mars Attacks) would see with a high quality 19th century telescope. [Based on a wild guess at the aperture needed for sub 1 meter resolution (30 cm per pixel) from a low Mars orbit (200 km) and no atmosphere.] Earth would look very inviting.

On the other hand, Enceladus looks good for ice boating, winter rally events, and possibly ice fishing. The ongoing discoveries out there are amazing.

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