Quick moon shot.

 

Sucks we don't have telescopes sensitive enough to see the flag on the moon.

 

But there is a reflector thing that anyone can shoot a laser at to see exactly how far away the moon is at any given time... or just for kicks. I think they showed it on Myth Busters in the last 5 minutes of the moon landing episode.

 

The flag? No. But we can see some of the larger items as well as the foot trails.

Apollo 12:




Apollo 14:




Apollo 17:

 

I'm sure each one of those foot prints was planned years in advance so I'm wondering why the LRV was parked so far away from the landing site where I assume the stage for leaving was. I'm not very knowledgeable on the lunar landing, but I know they had a reason for every move they made to squeeze as much activity as they could into the little amount of time they had.

 

It sounds kind of silly, but they wanted to get a good picture of the ascent stage lifting off.

The video camera on the LRV could be remote-controlled from the ground, but because of the distances involved, the control latency on the pan/tilt head relative to the video (as seen from Earth) was about 1.3 seconds in each direction. Thus, it was difficult to synchronize the motion of the tilt mechanism with the actual ascent of the LM. Problems on 15 and 16 prevented this shot (the tilt motor broke on 15, and the rover was parked in a bad spot on 16.) For 17, they backed up the LRV a bit more to get a wider shot, and controller Ed Fendell nailed it perfectly. Thus, we have this image of the last humans leaving the moon:

 

It's sad that we gave up on that kind of stuff. Or achievements in space are few and far between, and we really haven't done much meaningful boundary breaking like they probably thought we would do. We make huge strides early on, then it dropped off when people lost interest.

 

My immediate thought at the end of that clip was, "I have control of this camera on the LRV and the guys just left...now what? Do I just look around until the battery dies?"

 

Also, it really bothered me that they couldn't find a way to keep the solar panels clean on this thing so that they could get a lot longer mission out of it. I mean figure out how to get a pole in the ground with a simple brush and have the rover drive past it every once in a while. I know of course that its not nearly that simple or they would have done it, but you get the point.

 

EARLY MORNING PONY

 

you build it, sun.

 

...me?

 

sexiness revealed.


Test paint, whatcha guys think? The overspray will be taped off and repainted white on the front main plate and all other biddies. Turbo and longblock will be Ford Light Blue. I have always like that blue.

 

blue block = swag

 

But, warp drive

How NASA might build its very first warp drive

 

lolololololol

 

OMFG. revolutionary!!!!

I've never seen a cover of a song done by some nobody in a different style of music recorded on an elaborate scale by an amateur videographer on an HDR camera posted on youtube to try to get instant e-fame.

that never happens...mind blown.

 

You try and play it off like you're cool, but you know you enjoyed that vid.

 

I enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed this orginal piece of internet 15-minutes of fame:

 

made me think of this