Bob Space

Nasty blustery weekend is upon us. Good time to be indoors.
(more…)

I am so behind on space news, it’s tragic. Here’s some great stuff I only just now caught.

The television footage of the July 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing was broadcast from the moon to ground stations around the world. It was converted and relayed to Houston, from whence it went out to the news outlets. Archive footage of that event was actually a 16mm movie camera … pointed at a television display … showing the downconverted video … no wonder it looked so grainy and distorted. The original broadcast data, however, was recorded on magnetic tape at the receiver sites. Those tapes were thought lost forever. But…

NASA will hold a press event at the Newseum in Washington D.C. Thursday 16 July at 8:00 AM ET. The promise is to release “the best available broadcast-format copies of the lunar excursion, some of which had been locked away for nearly 40 years.” Did the missing tapes get found? So the rumors swirled at the end of last month. You can bet I’m setting my DVR to record this from NASA TV…

(more…)

A couple weeks later … time for a ketchup entry!

• The weather has finally warmed up and dried out. Unfortunately most of the 4-H club members are cross-committed with other summer events, which makes scheduling a challenge. We’re going to try to do a road trip on 1 Aug, and demo launches on 8 Aug, getting ahead of the State Fair / 4-H Expo in mid-August. In September we’ll wrap up our first year and stage an end-of-year/join-us-for-the-new-year meeting. And then we’ll see. Next year I want to swing a trip to NASA Ames … and we’ll see what else happens.
• DVR Life is picking up again, with the return of Torchwood this month and BBC America snaring this year’s Doctor Who shows for first-run. I’m still working out how to manipulate home movies sanely, but after consulting the manual (gasp!) I think that will be fine. (Once I get footage into the computer, it’s not easy to rearrange the content. Not a problem with TV shows, but I’m seldom so organized as to be able to “edit in the camera” and take the shots in the order I want. But happily the camera will let me arrange my shots in a “playlist”, and play them out in whatever order I set. If I know I’m planning a certain scene to be “first” or “last”, I can put a transition on it, too. If only I had titles cards. Well, I suppose I can put those in via Toast.)
• We really have to find that missing Netflix movie.
• My Galileoscope has not yet arrived. Soon, I hope.
• I’ll be going back to glasses full-time this fall/when my supply of contact lenses runs out. (Which will invalidate my Facebook pic.) I switched to contacts ’cause they’d be nicer for stargazing and such. But I haven’t done the stargazing, and the balance tips back in favor of glasses now. I’ll probably haul The Lady to the Optician to let her help me pick them. She has to look at them the most, after all.