So, this is what I'm thinking…

From planetary.org, check out this image of the International Space Station taken in the X-band (not to be confused with X-ray) area of the electromagnetic spectrum as it passed in front of a German Earth observation satellite named TerraSAR-X. From the article “In contrast to optical cameras, radar does not “see” surfaces. Instead, it is much more sensitive to the edges and corners which bounce back the microwave signal it transmits” which is why we see a ghostly outline. Truly an amazing image.

45 years ago on 18-Mar-1965, Aleksei Leonov became the first space walker. Most people should know the name, if not the date.  He had quite the career, but it’s his 12 minutes outside his Vostok spaceship which I most admire.

See, while he was outside his spaceship his protective space suit expanded because of the vacuum; inside his space suit there was air for him to breathe, but outside there was no air at all so his suit expanded like a balloon. This expansion made it impossible for him to reenter his ship because the suit was too stiff to flex. Gene Cernan, in his book “Last Man on the Moon”, described this phenomenon. During Gemini 9, he was to venture outside and do some simple tasks outside the spaceship like use tools to loosen and tighten nuts. After only a few minutes of this kind of activity he was almost exhausted because he was fighting against the suit the whole time.

So Leonov is outside is spaceship and has found that he can’t maneuver himself back into the airlock. What to do? Was he to die alone, far from help and any hope of rescue? No, not this cosmonaut! He did what seems suicidal and foolish to most people: he let the life-giving air out of his suit! This allowed the suit to deflate enough for him to squeeze himself back into his spaceship and turn the air back on. Saved! Seriously, you need to have solid brass balls to even consider doing this.

While he was being groomed by the Soviets to be the first man on the moon, he dodged a few other bullets: he was to have commanded Soyuz 11, the first crew to visit the world’s first Space Station Salyut 1, but was dropped when one of the crew came down with suspected tuberculosis. The Soyuz 11 mission went fine, but the replacement crew of three perished when reentering the earth’s atmosphere.

Sadly, Leonov never did make it to the moon. Leonov went on to command another significant mission: the Apollo Soyuz Test Project, a joint mission between the Soviets and Americans. This mission served to ease tensions in the space race.

Leonov is an artist, a pilot and warrior, an author, and twice Hero of the Soviet Union. And someone I wish I could hang around to soak up some of his awesomeness.

This is what two large boulders smashing into each other at 11000 mph looks like. A couple days ago NASA released this photo observed by Hubble. It would have been great to see “live”. The asteroid belt isn’t exactly quite like what you see in movies like “The Empire Strikes Back”; there isn’t a dense ring of rocks in a seemingly random, chaotic orbit and you can’t stand on one and wave to your friend on a neighbouring rock. There’s thousands, millions of kilometers between sizable objects so this type of collision has never been observed before. The Imperial TIE Fighters would be quite safe following Han Solo into our asteroid field, and I’m pretty sure there would be no giant space worms to gobble them up. The closeup in the lower right looks bad-ass, like some sort of evil talon spaceship streaking through the sky.

During the middle of last week I revisited a site I haven’t browsed to in a while. Heavens-above.com can be used to, among other things, determine when the International Space Station is visible in your part of the world. You plug in your lat and long (or choose your city from a menu) and the site will tell you when you can see the ISS float by with tables showing the time, the direction, the azimuth etc. I used to do this more often a few years ago; I’d grab Suzanne and we’d rush outside and watch this bright dot go overhead. I’d marvel, and Suzanne would pretend to be interested. It was more interesting to watch it magically appear or disappear in the middle of the sky as it came out of or went into the Earths shadow. I also used this site to predict Iridium flares which are awesome. Should do this again sometime…

Anyhow, this week I saw that on Friday night it’d be visible for a good 10 minutes going from horizon to horizon with a maximum altitude of 60-odd degrees (not too bad on the neck muscles) and an amazing magnitude of -3.2. Very bright indeed.

So, when I got home Friday night I had about an hour to give Jett and Ashton a quick lesson in orbital mechanics and an even quicker history on the construction of the ISS. I’m pretty sure they got the gist of it all; that the ISS goes around the Earth, it’s a joint project between the Russian, American and European space agencies, that it needs to be around dawn or dusk if you want to see it etc.

So, with that in mind I thought we’d bring up NASAs own tracking map so we could see exactly where it was, and so we could run outside at the right time, but unfortunately that map is turned out to be hopelessly inaccurate at the time. Not sure why, maybe it misread the time/timezone from my system clock but it seemed to be way out. So we made do with the map at Heavens-Above.com which was fine. We saw that it was flying right over London, England and its path would bring it over Perth via India all in about 35 minutes. Pretty fast!

So, at the appointed time which turned out to be about 5 past 8 we wandered outside and turned it into a competition to find the space station first. It wasn’t hard. We all knew it was coming from the north-east. When it came it was easily the brightest thing in the sky besides the moon. Ashton asked me if I was really serious about Sirius being the brightest star. Haw Haw.

So, yeah we watched it for a few minutes. A silent, bright light floating by. I think Ashton lost interest pretty quickly but Jett stayed the whole time.

The thing is, for the rest of the night and for most of the next day Jett would ask, “Dad, where is the space station now?” and he’d demand to get back into the computer to use the “space map” to find it. This would happen about every half hour. Once he found out where it was, he’d run around the house and give status updates to Suzanne and Ashton. “Mum, it’s over Japan now!” He asked me to find pictures and the names of the current crew too. I wonder why this has captured his imagination so much? And I wonder how long it will last.

Next weekend I plan on breaking out the old telescope and pointing it at Mars which is currently close to opposition. Moons’s a bit bright now, so we’ll wait a week.

And the Lord God spake unto Moses, saying:

For mine own purpose have I made these things. Here is wisdom and it remaineth in me.
And by the word of my power, have I created them, which is mine Only Begotten Son, who is full of grace and truth.
And worlds without number have I created; and I also created them for mine own purpose; and by the Son I created them, which is mine Only Begotten.
…
The heavens, they are many, and they cannot be numbered unto man; but they are numbered unto me, for they are mine.
And as one earth shall pass away, and the heavens thereof even so shall another come; and there is no end to my works, neither to my words.
For behold, this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.

Suzanne and I went to see Avatar on the Boxing Day public holiday. I hadn’t heard anything about this movie until about 3-4 months ago when the sci-fi forums I frequent were abuzz with chatter about James Cameron’s newest offering. Some were talking about it as if it was going to be the greatest movie in the history of celluloid, others were ‘meh’, another over hyped movie from a director who hasn’t worked in 15 years. Some friends of mine were in one camp, some friends in the other. So I decided I’d keep an open mind about this movie and do a bit of research before I went to see it.

After it opened, various articles appeared in blogs and newspapers. This one said the movie was “vomit inducing”, but in a nice way. This article from Wired is one of the better ones, and makes it sound like Avatar is the culmination of a 30 year quest for James Cameron to prove he has a bigger wang than George Lucas. He was pretty much trying to out-Lucas what George did with Star Wars in 1977.

In 1977, a 22-year-old truck driver named James Cameron went to see Star Wars with a pal. [snip] Now he was facing a deflating reality: He had been daydreaming about the kind of world that Lucas had just brought to life. Star Wars was the film he should have made.

But it’s apples and oranges. Here’s the thing; George Lucas was a young director, was working with 70’s technology and worked to a budget of about $8M and managed to produce the magic we call Star Wars. Cameron, as of 2009, has had 25 years of experience working with the latest digital and robotic technology, and with movies budgeted in the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars. Don’t get me wrong; Terminator, Abyss, T2, True Lies and Titanic (at least the second half) are among my favourite movies but they don’t hold a candle to what George created. Star Wars changed science fiction and movie history and 30+ years later the franchise and fanbase is still going strong. Sure, a lot of fans complain that George stole their childhood from them and destroyed Star Wars with The Phantom Menace, but compare James Cameron’s Aliens to the original Ridley Scott masterpiece, Alien. One is a dark, moody science fiction horror, the other is a hoo-rah shoot-em up exercise in Marine flagwaving, which is one of the lowest common denominators in cinema.

Which leads me to the theme and storyline of Avatar. I had heard it described as “Dances with Wolves” in space, and this description is pretty much on the money. I guess it’s true that in 2009 there are no more original stories, so most movies nowadays sell the way the story is told and not the story itself. Selling the sizzle rather than the steak. In this case, the story is told in a fantasy world with state of the art 3-D digital technology.

All in all, the movie was great. It was a familiar story, well told. The 3-D effects were a good novelty. The only other 3-D I’ve seen was a docco on the International Space Station when I was in San Francisco in 2002. But the digital world Cameron created was fantastic; the level of detail was breathtaking, and because it was all digitally filmed the physics and movement seemed to be very realistic. Often with CGI and live action mixed you can see where one starts and one ends, and sometimes the interaction of the characters and the sets don’t seem to work well together, with visual mis-cues confusing the viewer and detracting from the overall effect. But Avatar was pretty seamless. From dust and smoke in the atmosphere, to the physics of a foot (or hoof) impacting on the ground… it was hard to fault. You can certainly see where $300M went. The only thing nobody has been able to do well so far in CGI is full sunlight. Even with Avatar, you knew that it wasn’t real because it still looked a little dark like it was an overcast day. If the jungle scenes can look like a natural environment like Apocalypto or something, then I think anything will be possible.

So I was reading a friends blog post where a little program called Celestia was mentioned in passing and it reminded me of some art I’d created many moons ago and shared with the guys at mousedroid.com and potf2.com which are two favourite Star Wars collecting web sites of mine where I’ve met many interesting people and made some great friends. Anyhow, I actually saved a couple of those images from the Great Disk Loss of 2006 and here they are in all their glory. I do remember spending a bit of time getting the angles of the cameras and lighting just right on a lot of shots. It’s not like the movies where the ships are always well lit;  when a starship is in the shadow of a planet, it’s hard to see. And it was especially hard on my underpowered little POS computer I had. I did a few others involving fictional planets,  ”Beanstalks” and other space stations but these three images are all that’s left. I should check out the latest version and get back into it, make some more images. They might have a “Perfectly light this object” switch now.

Here’s some fantastic inspiring Nebula-themed wallpapers for dual monitors.  Dark, not too busy. Just right for a mellow mood.

Pictures have been released from the newly refurbished Hubble Space Telescope, and they are glorious. NASA gave Hubble one more roll of the dice when it sent STS-125 on a servicing and calibration mission to get a few more years out of the old girl.

To be honest, I thought it’d be more economical to make a new space telescope since each Shuttle mission costs about half a billion dollars. There’s been five servicing missions (named Missions 1, 2, 3A, 3B and 4), so a goodly sum has been spent. Hubble is a few months short of 20 years old and was built using late 70s and 80s technology. Surely a new platform designed from the ground up with 21st century technology would be cheaper and yeild even better results? At any rate, the pictures are in and will continue for at least another 4 or 5 years.

It’s funny. You live in the universe, but you never do these things until someone comes to visit.

From the press release:

Hubble now enters a phase of full science observations. The demand for
observing time will be intense. Observations will range from studying
the population of Kuiper Belt objects at the fringe of our solar
system to surveying the birth of planets around other stars and
probing the composition and structure of extrasolar planet
atmospheres. There are ambitious plans to take the deepest-ever
near-infrared portrait of the universe to reveal never-before-seen
infant galaxies that existed when the universe was less than 500
million years old. Other planned observations will attempt to shed
light on the behavior of dark energy, a repulsive force that is
pushing the universe apart at an ever-faster rate.

See some of the latest images here.

See a comparison of a previous shot at the same location to the new shot in the above thumbnail here.

Another few moon themed dual screen wallpapers I found. I like the contrast of the colourful flag and lunar lander parts against the desolate grey of the moon and night sky. First one is Neil Armstrong from Apollo 11, second one is James Irwin from Apollo 15.

These are suitable for dual screen monitor wallpapers or screensavers.