Sun 19 Jul 2009
B/P History of the World: Man Lands on Moon
Posted by admin under Balkers
[6] Comments
This first vid is the actual low-fi footage seen on hundreds of millions of TV sets around the world on July 20, 1969. Neil Armstrong and Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin land the lunar module and get out, making them the first human beings to set foot on any extra-terrestrial surface – length 1:44
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Digitally enhanced summary version of the Apollo 11 mission. Best in full screen mode – length 1:53The moonwalk, and all the space program events, were a big deal at when I was a kid. Having seen the televised events “live” while as they happened, in context. In the 80’s, I had a chance to go inside NASA in Greenbelt Maryland to meet a scientist working on a project in a laboratory (thermal exterior paint for shuttle). I got a bit of an informal tour, rather fun, good people, bet it would be a nice work environment.
This is not exactly related, but it is Out of this World: see these Jupiter impact photos, see attached link, seems like Jupitor would have a hole in it’s ozone layer now.
This unknown object, perhaps as large as earth, this week? See this site for great imagery.
http://jupiter.samba.org
Images captured by Anthony Wesley on 19th July 2009 at 1554UTC from Murrumbateman Australia
QUOTED: Observation Report
Update (20th July 1100UT) Glenn Orton from JPL has imaged this site using the NASA Infrared Telescope on Hawaii and confirms that it is an impact site and not a localised weather event.
I started this imaging session on Jupiter at approximately 11pm local time (1300UTC). The weather prediction was not promising, clear skies but a strong jetstream overhead according to the Bureau of Met. The temperature was also unusually high for this time of year (winter), also a bad sign.
The scope in use was my new 14.5″ newtonian, in use now for a few weeks and so far returning excellent images.
I was pleasantly surprised to find reasonable imaging conditions and so I decided to continue recording data until maybe 1am local time. By about midnight (12:10 am) the seeing had deteriorated and I was ready to quit. Indeed I had hovered the mouse over the exit button on my capture application (Coriander for Linux) and then changed my mind and decided instead to simply take a break for 30 minutes and then check back to see if the conditions had improved. It was a very near thing.
When I came back to the scope at about 12:40am I noticed a dark spot rotating into view in Jupiters south polar region started to get curious. When first seen close to the limb (and in poor conditions) it was only a vaguely dark spot, I thouht likely to be just a normal dark polar storm. However as it rotated further into view, and the conditions improved I suddenly realised that it wasn’t just dark, it was black in all channels, meaning it was truly a black spot.
My next thought was that it must be either a dark moon (like Callisto) or a moon shadow, but it was in the wrong place and the wrong size. Also I’d noticed it was moving too slow to be a moon or shadow. As far as I could see it was rotating in sync with a nearby white oval storm that I was very familiar with – this could only mean that the back feature was at the cloud level and not a projected shadow from a moon. I started to get excited.
It took another 15 minutes to really believe that I was seeing something new – I’d imaged that exact region only 2 days earlier and checking back to that image showed no sign of any anomalous black spot.
Now I was caught between a rock and a hard place – I wanted to keep imaging but also I was aware of the importance of alerting others to this possible new event. Could it actually be an impact mark on Jupiter? I had no real idea, and the odds on that happening were so small as to be laughable, but I was really struggling to see any other possibility given the location of the mark. If it really was an impact mark then I had to start telling people, and quickly. In the end I imaged for another 30 minutes only because the conditions were slowly improving and each capture was giving a slightly better image than the last.
Eventually I stopped imaging and went up to the house to start emailing people, with this image above processed as quick and dirty as possible just to have something to show.
More images will come along from me and many other people in the next few days.
*NOTE* Priority is being given to processing and uploading images as fast as possible, so the image quality is no necessarily as good as it might be. When time permits these images will be replaced by higher quality versions.
Welcome back Dawna. The space program was a huge deal in the 1960’s. Each launch of an Apollo mission leading up to Apollo 11, was a TV event watched by many millions.
And the long-play CBS video above (other parts of it are on YouTube), is particularly nice for those of us 8 years old at the time, who had already watched several of the Apollo launches, who’s mom neglected to wake him up for the lunar landing 7/20/69… (about 11:40 PM New York time ;^)
As I’ve mentioned before on B/P, America exports many things both positive and negative, to the rest of the world. I’ll be highly critical of
this nation when warranted, and also strongly in the corner of those things we’ve gotten right over the centuries: A legitimate form (usually) of self-determination via the ballot box / free expression as a right & strength rather than threat to be quashed / equal civil rights by gender, ethnicity, religion, age & infirmity / limited governmental powers & privacy protections against a police state / separation of church & state, and
a general right to live as you choose.
The Apollo Project set out by John F. Kennedy circa 1961, is one thing America got right. Beyond the obvious exploratory and science values of it, you simply can’t watch the images from those missions and not understand our common human existence on this planet.
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Cool pics!
Link to some awesome full-screen photos of the total solar eclipse across Asia this week (7/22);
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/solar-b/eclipse_2009.html
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