Meteor & Mars

An Aurigid Meteor flashes through the constellation the shower takes its name from. The planet Mars is at right just above center with the Hyades cluster that marks the head of Taurus the Bull at upper right. The meteor was moving from bottom to top and shows a distinctive green appearance at the start of the trail. The general orange glow of the sky is due to the city lights that dominate my northeastern sky. I was able to see 22 Aurigids last night with a peak rate of 5 in one 5 minute period about 20 minutes before the predicted time of the peak. This image was taken with my 24mm lens with an exposure of 30 seconds at f/1.8, ISO 400.

Hello Aristarchus

After totality ended, it was fun watching the lunar surface re-emerge from the Earth's shadow, as the procession of familiar lunar features slowly moved into sunlight, it was like meeting old friends (in this case after only seeing them dimly for the last two hours in the Earth's shadow...). The bright crater Aristarchus appears at upper right shortly after emerging from the Earth's shadow. Aristarchus is an interesting site, known for producing most of the Lunar Transient Events which some think might be volcanic in origin. I suspect that they are mostly cases of the crater reflecting Earthshine back at us very efficiently, but no one really knows yet. Maybe someday when we go back, we can land a mission there to study it in detail. This image was taken at 300mm focal length with an exposure of 1/50 seconds at f/8, ISO 200.

Lunar Eclipse - near mid-eclipse

This is the eclipsed Moon near the middle of the eclipse. Note the deep orange-brown color, caused by the light scattered around the Earth's atmosphere that reaches the Moon. This image was taken at 300mm focal length with an exposure of 2 seconds at f/5.6, ISO 800. Note the trailing in the stars that are visible in this image. The lunar image is also smeared by that amount from top left to bottom right so that the image appears fuzzy, especially in that direction.

Lunar Eclipse

I just came inside as the still partially eclipsed Moon is setting in the western sky and the morning twilight is starting to turn the skies a deep blue. Just finished downloading all my pictures and here's one of them, taken just a few minutes before the total phase began. A sliver of the Moon is still in the Penumbra, lit by the sun just peaking over the edge of the Earth while most of the Moon is only lit by the light scattering through the Earth's atmosphere - imagine looking back from the Moon towards Earth - you'd see an orange ring around the Earth of sunlight scattered through the atmosphere and around that would be the Sun's Corona - what a sight that would be! This image was taken at 300mm focal length with an exposure of 1/2 second at f/8, ISO 400.

Spitfire

This British Spitfire sits across the gallery from the Me-109. This image was taken at 18mm focal length with an exposure of 1/30 seconds at f/3.5, ISO 800.

Me109

The Air & Space Museum has some excellent displays of planes and jets. This Messersmitt 109 resides in an impressive collection of WWII fighters. This image was taken at 18mm focal length with an exposure of 1/20 seconds at f/3.5, ISO 800.

Apollo-Soyuz

In 1975, the superpowers first attempt at cooperation in space - the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) flew the last Apollo mission into space to dock with a Soyuz spacecraft in Earth orbit. A special docking adaptor was used to mate the two spacecraft which each used rather different docking mechanisms. This effort led eventually to cooperative ventures in space including shuttle flights to the Mir space station and now the International Space Station. This exhibit in the Air & Space Museum shows the size of both spacecraft, both in relative and absolute scales. This image was taken at 18mm focal length with an exposure of 1/160 seconds at f/5.6, ISO 1600.

Explorer 1

This is a replica of the Explorer 1 spacecraft in the Air & Space Museum. It hangs roughly directly above the Viking lander. Explorer 1 was the first United States satellite and is credited with discovering the Van Allen radiation belts. It was launched on a Jupiter rocket in January 1958. This image was taken at 238mm focal length with an exposure of 1/160 seconds at f/6.3, ISO 1600.

Viking Lander

Two Viking landers successfully landed on Mars in 1976, the first on the 7th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon on July 20. The thing I remember most about that is that we were traveling across country, moving from New York to Seattle and passed through Salt Lake City at that time. When I saw the newspaper the next day and they had the first picture from Viking 1 on the surface of Mars, I thought "Sheesh! The landscape we just drove through looks just like that!" Nowadays, the images by our landers and rovers on Mars make me want to go take a hike over to the hills in the distance. This image was taken at 18mm focal length, with an exposure of 1/125 seconds at f/4.5, ISO 800.

Surveyor

The Surveyor Spacecraft landed on the Moon before the Apollo missions in order to study the surface characteristics as well as places that Apollo might not be able to get to. The Surveyor 3 spacecraft was even visited by the Apollo 12 astronauts. They brought back the scoop and the television camera that it carried to study the longterm affects of exposure to the lunar environment. This exhibit hangs above the LM and right next to the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft. This image was taken at 22mm focal length with an expsoure of 1/160 seconds at f/5.6, ISO 1600.

Lunar Orbiter

The Lunar Orbiter spacecraft were used to take a close look at the Moon for potential landing sites for Apollo. Later, it did a more general survey of the Moon and produced closeups of a number of features of interest on the Moon before Apollo orbited the Moon at the end of the 1960s. The spacecraft used two cameras, one with a narrow field of view and the other with a wider field of view, imaging on film which was developed onboard the spacecraft before being scanned and transmittted electronically back to Earth. You can see the twin lenses of the camera system near the center of the spacecraft. Lunar Orbiter II took an oblique image of the prominant crater Copernicus which was called the "Photo of the Century" at the time it was published. This Lunar Orbiter hangs above LM-2. This image was taken at 49mm focal length with an exposure of 1/125 seconds at f/5.6, ISO 1600.

Spaceship One

Spaceship One hangs in the main gallery at the Air & Space Museum, not far from Columbia. Behind it you can see the Bell X-1 airplane that Chuck Yeager flew past the speed of sound for the first time and to its left is Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis. Spaceship One carried the first private pilot into Space, rocketing to an altitude of just over 100 kilometers. This image was taken at 55mm focal length with an exposure of 1/60 seconds at f/5.6, ISO 400.

Apollo 11 CM

The Apollo 11 CM "Columbia" is a big attraction at the Air & Space Museum. There wasn't a moment that it did not have a crowd around it. It is amazing to consider that of the Saturn V launch vehicle that left Earth on July 16, 1969 - all 363 feet of it, only this tiny capsule returned to Earth on July 24 after the successful landing on the 20th. This image was taken at 70mm focal length with an exposure of 1/160 seconds at f/6.3, ISO 1600.

3D LM

This 3D anaglyph of the Lunar Module at the Air & Space Museum was made with Stereo Picture Maker. You'll need your red-cyan anaglyph glasses to see it properly.

Pigeons of the sea...

One of the most common and aggressive birds on the beach are the seagulls. These two are looking for anything that might be edible while eying beachgoers and other birds along the waters edge. This image was taken at 300mm focal length with an exposure of 1/1000 seconds at f/5.6, ISO 100.

Another one for Frank...

This young lady was just packing up to leave after enjoying an afternoon under the sun. Gotta love bikinis.....

A picture for Frank...

This one is for Frank - actually, I know that several of my friends will enjoy this one too.... We drove out to the Delaware and Maryland beaches near Lewes and Dewey Beach to enjoy the surf and sand and sun. Of course, the pretty scenery walking the beach was easy on the eyes as well.....

Gene Cernan's lunar spacesuit

This is the spacesuit worn by Apollo 17 commander Gene Cernan while he walked the Taurus-Littrow Valley in December 1972. Compare this suit to the previous image of Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin's suit. This suit was an improvement on the earlier suit, allowing the astronaut more flexibility (for example easier to bend at the waist so he could sit on the Lunar Rover). The most obvious difference is in the arrangement of the suit connectors for the various hoses as well as with the red stripes that were used starting on Apollo 13 to distinguish the commander from the lunar module pilot in the lunar photography and video. This image was taken at 24mm focal length with an exposure of 1/25 seconds at f/1.8, ISO 800, with a flash.

Buzz's lunar spacesuit

Here is Buzz Aldrin's suit which he wore on the surface of the Moon during the Apollo 11 flight. The slight grey color is moondust. This image was taken at 24mm focal length with an exposure of 1/25 seconds at f/1.8, ISO 800, with a flash.

70mm Hasselblad

This is an Apollo Hasselblad 500 EL camera like those used on Apollo 11. This is possibly an interior camera as it does not have the silver coatings that helped protect the camera and film from heating by sunlight. Magazine "N" is attached to the back of the camera and you can see flanges on the lens that allowed a gloved hand to adjust the focus and exposure settings of the camera. The shutter button is on the front of the base of the camera at right. The surface cameras also had a mounting bracket that allowed it to be attached to the chest mounted RCU and they also had a pistol grip attached to the bottom to allow the camera to be handheld. The pistol grip also had a shutter trigger. This image was taken with my 24mm lens with an exposure of 1/20 seconds at f/1.8, ISO 800.