Partially eclipsed

 Image credit NASA, Nov 14 NZ Time, click to enlarge

The partial eclipse today was AWESOME. We didn't get treated to the full total thing like Cairns, but even at 76% obscuration like we had in Wellington it was spectacular. Which is good, because it will be 2025 before we get another one here anything like it :).

 Image credit Stardome

The further south you went the less eclipse you got, but to make up for it we had a perfect day, the only clear sunny day I can remember seeing an eclipse on, and this was the best I've ever seen. As not quite totality approached, there was a distinct sudden chill in the air to go with the eerie not-quite-right light level for a bright sunny day. Being able to both see and feel the eclipse was amazing.

Since direct observation with the naked eye is not an option with these things (unless you want to risk permanent eye damage, can't stress that enough), indirect viewing was in order. Around the science establishment I work at there were a few methods being demonstrated.

My attempt at making a pinhole viewer using a piece of paper on a clipboard and a piece of cardboard was successful, but unspectacular (although still cool since it was my first glimpse of the eclipse):

A colleague made a more effective one (I think the key might have been a thinner piece of cardboard to act as a lens).

Failing that you could always just use your hand, making the "OK" sign and allowing the sunlight to pass through the gap between your thumb and forefinger.

Or just find a tree, where the gaps between the leaves can be just as effective as pinhole lenses,  a phenomenon I'd heard about but never seen before today:

Pinhole viewer using just a tree (evergreen preferred) and a piece of paper:

A slightly more elaborate setup involving bigger cardboard, a tripod and binoculars also yielded good results:

Nothing was quite as good though as (safely) looking right at the sun and moon through a suitable filter, in this case a handy piece of mylar film that another colleague had thoughtfully prepared:

And this was the icing on the day for me, since when I put the mylar in front of my telephoto camera lens the result was spectacular (disclaimer, be very, very careful when you do this. Never ever look at the sun directly through unfiltered optics like telescopes, binoculars or camera lenses). With the settings adjusted you could even see sunspots (the little dots) and mountain ranges silhouetted on the moon.

One of the coolest things I've ever seen, let alone been able to photograph

Stuff of Legend

The other week it occurred to me that an Olympic medal may be one of the few things that render people close to immortal. Then I remembered that about 384,000 kilometers away there are some tangible human artifacts that effectively are immortal:

 Buzz Aldrin boot and lunar footprint, Apollo 11, image via NASA

The footprints and other artifacts that twelve men from Earth left on the Moon will remain recognisable for millenia at least if left undisturbed. The news today of the death of the first man to leave them reminded me of this.

Coincidentally I was reading my now well-worn copy of A Man On The Moon the other day, and came across a passage that resonated in a way I hadn't felt the umpteen times I've read it before:

"everything he did, even casual speech, seemed to be the result of a great deal of thought . . . Armstrong often kept people at arm's length. He rarely engaged in idle conversation, and steadfastly guarded his privacy.
"In time, the NACA pilots realised that Armstrong wasn't aloof; he was shy. Once they got past his great reserve, they found warmth. Once he became a friend, he was a good friend . . . If he could be reticent, then he could also become so involved in conversation while driving that his passengers nervously eyed the road. "

It's obviously describing Neil Armstrong, but I suddenly recognised a few of those personality traits in myself, especially shyness being mistaken for aloofness. That's about as close as I'll ever get to what he achieved (and the end of any self aggrandising comparisons), but it is nice to know there were aspects to him I could relate to. His modesty would mean he would even downplay his own significance at being the first moonwalker, claiming that the landing itself was the real achievement, and that was something that he and Buzz Aldrin (who made a nice statement today here) had done simultaneously. Even without Apollo 11, his combat flying career with the US Navy, his test flying career with NACA/NASA (including flying what is still the fastest manned aircraft ever), and his previous spaceflight on Gemini 8 (which he personally saved from disaster under difficult circumstances when a system malfunction occurred) would have been worthy of note. It makes me respect him and his withdrawal from publicity even more - he could have been the celebrity of celebrities had he chosen to.

Dr Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy has written a nice piece on Armstrong's passing today, and says "we can divide all of history into two parts: before humans landed on the Moon, and after". I was born 7 years after Apollo 11; I have never known a world where we haven't walked on the moon, and I'm grateful to Armstrong and all of his peers for making it that way. I have never grown out of that childlike wonder of seeing images and accounts of people walking on another world apart from our own. There are more famous images of Armstrong, but this is my favourite, taken on the Moon just after the first moonwalk concluded, and it sums up that feeling for me.

Image via NASA

There are now eight living moonwalkers of the original twelve. Hopefully there will be more before that number drops to zero.

Google Apollo 11

Courtesy of The Bad Astronomer, this is todays piece of wow. The approach and landing of Apollo 11 reconstructed and visualised using Google Moon synched with the original landing footage and time-stamps. This is way cool:

Lunar awesomeness

In the past few weeks as an offshoot of it's Lunar mapping mission, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been taking detailed images of the Apollo landing sites of 1969-72. There is a backgrounder from stuff here, with a really nice summary at Bad Astronomy here.

Here is the LRO shot of the second landing site (Apollo 12, November 1969). You can see the footprints left by astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean as they conducted their explorations (picture credit NASA, click to enlarge):
And here is Pete Conrad making some of those footprints as he investigates the unmanned Surveyor 3 probe that preceded the astronauts by a couple of years (picture credit NASA, click to enlarge):
They are awesome because they are the most basic of human calling cards, and they on another world. And since there is no weather on the moon, they will be there essentially forever if left undisturbed (Transformers and Independence Day Aliens notwithstanding).

Catching the Moon III, Super edition

Listening to: Recollection - Concrete Blonde (1996)

Installments I and II here and here respectively.

After weather messed up the last couple, I finally got a chance to catch the Full Moon last night. Fortunately it coincided with the Supermoon (link explaining why it is super and also debunking its suggested earthquake causing ability here ). To be honest though, any increase in apparent size or brightness wasn't too obvious from here.

I even contrived to catch the moonrise over the Rimutaka ranges as the day ended. As mostly usual, click to embiggen:

Nearly Full Moon, 19 March 2011. Interesting to note when the shot is enlarged you can see lunar mountains and craters roughing up the horizon around its edges. Also just noted the camera was somewhat tilted when I took this, so the orientation is screwed up.

Full Moon, 20 March 2011, correctly oriented (albeit upside down if you are from the northern hemisphere...).

Will try again next month, I can probably do better at this with practice.

In other news

Noted the other week the guy behind Bad Astronomy reflecting on the tenth anniversary of a certain notorious, biased, misleading piece of tabloid trash posing as a documentary being broadcast on Fox...

Moon Hoax +10

The resulting rebuttal he wrote is still on line here and looking every one of it's ten years old, but is still a good jumping off point for anyone who has questions about the hoax theory.

Nearly 36 years after the end of the Apollo programme, it's successor the Space Shuttle is also winding down. Discovery was the third shuttle to fly, and first went into space in 1984. Since then it has completed 38 space flights, and was launched for the last time last Thursday. By the time it comes back to Earth for the last time next week it will have clocked up nearly a year in space.

That's all cool, but really just an excuse to show this cool video of Discovery's final launch as seen from a passing airliner:

Catching the Moon II

Listening to: MP3 player on alphabetical by song title, which is almost random anyway. Have just had 'Which way to America' by Living Colour, 'Whiskey in the Jar' by Thin Lizzy, 'White Wedding' by Billy Idol, and appropriately, 'Whole of the moon' by The Waterboys.

Gibbous Moon last night 17 Jan. I tried a different white balance setting for this one compared to the half moon in the previous post to get a slightly more natural colour. The Tycho crater (upper centre) and it's impact rays are also starting to show a bit better as the moon gets closer to full. I'm still playing with ways to deal with the contrast between the dark maria and the lighter parts so that both of them resolve nicely.
Tonight is too tropical, hot and wet and decayed cyclon-ey (seriously, 20+ degrees, even though it is raining and nearly 1030 at night) for a photo, so I took advantage of a break in the clouds last night to get this shot.

Catching the moon*

I've been playing around with photographing the waxing moon over the last few days. It is a deceptively tricky subject, and I haven't quite got the hang of it yet.

Cresent Moon, 08 Jan 2011:

Half moon about 15 minutes ago:

* Papa, please get the moon for me is one of Charlotte's favourite stories at the moment. Pointing out the moon will usually get a "Catch the mooooonn daddy!" in response

Forty Years Ago

Got this in the paper the morning to mark the fortieth anniversary of the first moon landing. Its a reprint of The Dominion's edition for that day.
There is a copy of the original at my parents place. Strange to think that this era defining event occured the better part of half a century ago. Strange also to think this was only seven years before I was born. The last moon landing occured less than four years before I was born. The whole Apollo programme now feels like the last dramatic expression of the technological idealism and innocence that marked the immediate post war era. Nothing in manned spaceflight since has even come close to inspiring the imagination the way Apollo did.
I have been interested in this for as long as I can remember. I grew up poring over the images of dusty astronauts exploring an alien terrain, and I still have the capacity to gaze at them in awe and wonder. Given the chance to time travel, high on the list would be viewing a Saturn V launch. Seeing a contraption the size of the aerial on Mt Kaukau launch itself into the sky alas is something I can only imagine and watch on video. I even have a favourite era of Apollo exploration. The first couple of missions were little more than proof of concept day stays; the first moonwalk lasted only two and a half hours. The later missions after Apollo 13 are much more interesting to me, with mulitple moonwalks lasting hours on end, with the lander remaining on the surface for up to three days, a rover to extend the astronauts reach, and real science being performed. While the historical focus is on the first landing, its easy to forget that there were five others, equally as successful, and equally as dangerous.
In the glory days of 1969, it felt like the start of a new era, which ultimately never came to pass, which is often the way of history. If the sixties were the party, the seventies were the hangover, and there were other and better things to do than build on Apollo's foundation. Rightly or wrongly, NASA is now a pale shadow of the organisation that put men on the moon. The sixties kids had the dramatic Apollo moon rocket as the spacecraft of their generation. Us seventies kids got the much more sensible and grown up Space Shuttle (itself now nearing retirement after 28 years of service). While I missed seeing any of the moon missions as they happened, I do remember a dark early morning in 1981 watching on live television the Columbia land after the first space shuttle flight into orbit. If the chance materialises to get to Florida for one of the few remaining Shuttle launches I'm there. And I still want to grow up to be an Astronaut.

P.S. Don't even get me started on the whole hoax/conspiracy thing. Thats a whole other post / rant in itself. It's depressing and frustrating that the idea has gained enough currency that it can be a topic of serious discussion, or failing that, being the question of the day to breakfast radio callers like I heard this morning. Its the ignorance posing as fact that both annoys and dismays me. The idea is simply not credible, let alone plausible. And the 'evidence' just isnt.