Half Moon

Got a real cool shot of the Moon last night in its half Moon stage, the clouds were just right and gave a haunting mysterious look to the Moon, which is what the Moon is , haunting and mysterious. Interestingly enough the Moon had no color to it , couldn't saturate it at all, probably because of the fact there has been no solar activity lately. I marked off on the image below where Apollo 11 landed at the Mare Tranquillitatis or as we know it, The Sea Of Tranquility. July 20, 1969, Niel Armstrong was the first man to set foot onto the Lunar surface, below it is marked as a black circle on one of the images I took last night.



The Mars Society is now taking applications for mock Mars missions at their Mars Desert Research Station. Applications will be accepted from healthy people between the ages of 18-60, must be understood there will be hard work, no pay but eternal glory, all applicants must be willing to sign a liability waiver. The Mars Society has 4 mock Mars habitats, one in the Canadian Arctic, their Desert Research Station, one in the Australian outback and one in Iceland. They state, "In these Mars like environments, we will launch a program of extensive long duration geology and biology field exploration operations, conducted in the same style and under many of the same constraints as they would on the red planet. By doing so we will start the process of learning how to explore Mars". The Mars Society has many big sponsors including NASA. If I had the time and money I would so be there, want some of that eternal glory.



Tycho Crater is my latest feature saturated color Lunar image, again lots of red, I'm running out of images that have any color in them, it was cool while it lasted. I've mentioned this fact before but I'll say it again cause it's cool. One of Tycho's rays intersected the Apollo 17's landing site over 2,000 kms away, the crew gathered a sample of the ejecta and the age of Tycho was determined by that sample, 108 million years old. Tycho is the large crater just left of center with a central peak.

You aliens can run but you can't hide! The Allen Radio Telescope is now online and has started gathering data last week with it's 42 radio dishes. The array will eventually have 350 dishes and in the next couple decades will gather 1,000 times as much data as was gathered by SETI in the last 45 years. Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft contributed 25 million dollars, another group of investors has contributed 25 million dollars and UC Berkeley and SETI are fund raising additional funds to complete the project. They estimate completion with all 350 dishes in place in just 3 years. Below is a YouTube video of the array in action.