The Old Moon In The New Moon's Arms

Moonlight is Sunlight that is reflected off the Moon to us on Earth, Earthshine or the Da Vinci Glow is caused by Moonlight reflected back off the Earth onto the Moon, or doubly reflected Sunlight. Called the Da Vinci Glow because Da Vinci first said the "ashen glow" was Sunlight reflected off our Earth back onto the Moon, before Leonardo figured it out no one knew what it was.

Got a couple of cool images a couple weeks ago, again I am amazed my camera worked , -35c. Best time to view Earthshine is during the crescent phase of the Moon and as it is setting. You can see the neat affect the Earthshine has on the Moon, it lights up the Moons dark phase so you can see the outline of the seas and the Moon itself.

STS 123 Shuttle Endeavour has a scheduled launch date of March 11 at 2:30am from the Kennedy Space Center. The Endeavour will be delivering and installing the first section of the Japanese Kibo science research facility on the ISS , as well as delivering and installing Dextre, a two armed robot with the ability to carry out maintenance work that would have been done before by spacewalking astronauts.

I'll leave you now with one of my current Sunsets as an animated gif.

Saturn II The Sequel

The above image of Saturn was taken a couple of mornings ago, Scope performed flawlessly, held the 450X Saturn dead center of the camera ccd chip while I was able to stack 60 images at .033 secs each. I tried to squeeze as much detail as possible out of Saturn, but being low on the horizon the atmosphere sucked the life and detail out of it. You can just make out a lower striped cloud band just below the rings, the upper band is partially obscured by the angled rings, I'll be posting more pics of the beautiful planet hopefully with more detail as I get more experienced and Saturn gets higher in the sky. In a couple of years we are going to loose those rings. Saturn is going to be at a viewing angle from Earth where the rings will be straight on, and since the average depth of the rings are only 1 km we won't be seeing much of them, so if your thinking of someday getting a telescope get one before the rings go bye bye. This of course is not permanent, they will come back over time, around 2 years after they disappear they slowly come back into view.

Space Shuttle Discovery is traveling to launch pad 39a at Cape Canaveral in preparation for mission STS (space transportation system) 120. The crew's main mission is to deliver and install the Italian built for the US, Harmony module which will serve as a connecting point between the US destiny lab, the European Space Agency's Columbus module and the Japanese Kibo module. Discovery launch date is set for October 23, don't forget to watch NASA TV as they have some crazy angled camera shots which are always cool to watch.

The rainbow in the above pic is caused by a water truck which sprays water ahead of the crawler-keeps the crawlerway moist and the dust down. The crawler, shuttle combined weight is 175 million pounds, moving at a rate of 1 mph.

Mars Rover Opportunity has gone into Victoria Crater at Duck Bay point. The image above shows opportunity in front of a band of what scientists think and I quote "Is the ancient surface of Mars prior to the impact that created Victoria". By sampling it at several different levels in the crater they are hoping to figure out the processes that led to its formation and its very distinctive appearance.

The pic above is one of my Total Lunar Eclipse photos blown up to 24"x36" and hung in my office, I'm happy it turned out so well, cool.

"Houston, We've Had A Problem Here"

As space shuttle Endeavour was approaching the International Space Station they performed a shuttle back flip. This allowed the ISS Astronauts to take Hi-Res pictures to be analyzed by NASA to see if any damaged had occurred to the shuttle's protective tile system during take off. The picture above shows the damage they did find. A 4"x4" piece of foam about 1.8" thick, weighing only a third of an ounce fell from a fuel tank bracket, creating a 3.5"x2" gash in the protective tile system, exposing the inner felt strip next to the shuttle's aluminum frame.

There are 3 options for repair available to the shuttle crew.
1. Paint the section with heat resistant paint.
2. Screw in a protective plate.
3. Fill the hole with a protective goo.

Now, if I were an Astronaut on board the Endeavour I'd be voting to do all 3 and then look around for some Duct tape as well, better safe than sorry, right? What's confusing to me is that NASA is still thinking about not doing any repairs at all, or as John Shannon, chairman of Endeavour's mission management team stated, "We're cautiously optimistic that we can fly as is". One of the reasons they are thinking of NOT doing any repairs is they only expect temperatures of 325 degrees on the exposed felt, and the upper limit for heating on the Endeavours hull at the damaged area is 350 degrees, am I the only one doing the math? that's only 25 degrees to the good. Even though the repair itself would be relatively simple, the fact that the Astronauts would be wearing a 300 -pound spacesuit carrying 150 pounds of tools, there is the danger that their tools could bang into the shuttle and cause even more damage, I say you send 2 patch kits with the repair guys/girls instead of one, and when you think of it, just how klutzy are these people anyway? These guys/girls are trained Astronauts. Anything could happen yet, I'm sure NASA will do the right thing whatever that may be.

The shuttle has been docked at the space station since Friday August 10th. They are scheduled to leave for home August 20th, landing August 22nd at 12:48 pm EDT. at the Kennedy Space Center. I was going to link to a NASA video which explained the STS118 mission, but I literally dozed off during the viewing, and it was only 8 minutes long, so many acronyms, why can't they make this stuff interesting? I mean I woke up and I just wanted it to be over.

Oh and by the way while all this other stuff is going on, two Russian Cosmonauts are trying to repair one of the Russian ISS computer systems that has been down since June due to condensation from an air conditioning unit. I will leave you with a Youtube video of the damaged area.