Oliphant’s cartoon shows a future under Mitt Romney and continued GOP domination of the House and Senate — no more Neil Armstrongs doing peaceful work for NASA, like going to the Moon. Tyson expresses hope for something different.
No, it’s not “time to come inside, Grampaw.” It’s time to vote. Vote for the guys whose budget doesn’t say “America cannot afford to be great anymore, American cannot afford to dream.”
Ha! A third thought:
Cover of Goodnight, Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown, with illustrations by Clement Hurd
One of the most dramatic categories of evidence that the U.S. landed men on the Moon is the detritus and other stuff they left behind. Now we have satellites orbiting the Moon that can send back images of the landing sites with an amazing amount of detail.
Around the 4th of July somebody usually wonders how those flags left behind, are doing.
CBS News reporter Jim Axelrod asked around; you can see his report at YouTube (CBS disallows embedding of these reports, so you’ll need to click the image a couple of times to go to the YouTube site for CBS):
(720 views of this report when I posted this; come on, news hounds, flag fliers and Moon and history buffs, you can boost that total.)
A long eclipse — more than an hour of almost-total coverage of the Moon’s disk. Clouds came and went, with a few good viewing times. With the naked eye, the view was spectacular. Through the 200 mm Pentax zoom, not quite as spectacular, even with the tripod mount. Photographing eclipses takes some skill that I don’t yet possess.
Clouds took a break
Eclipse totality
Eclipse nearing its end
Near the end of totality, where the shadow slips away from the full Moon, a bright white light provides a dazzlying view that confounds the light meters.
Celestial orange, tinged in silver
Step back, see a few of the starts, even from inside Dallas city limits
To every Earth shadow, there's a silver lining to confuse the built-in light meter
Blood-tinge gone, Earth's shadow retreats (all photos by Ed Darrell)
Moon over Corpus Christi Bay, June 25, 2010 - photo by Ed Darrell; use permitted with attribution
This is the scene that greeted delegates to the Texas Democratic Convention as they left the American Bank Center in Corpus Christi, Texas, at about 8:00 p.m. last Friday, June 25. (Natural light photo, handheld, 1/60th exposure at ISO 400)
The Moon was near full, and the tide was good for sailing.
Delegates had just heard Bill White accept the party’s nomination for governor.
In my brief period as a Sea Scout, I most enjoyed evening and night sailing. Water is astoundingly quiet at dusk and later, when sailing. In Corpus Christi I got a half-dozen shots and lamented I didn’t have a tripod, to get a better shot of the Moon.
There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
In a discussion of the Cold War, the Space Race, and the Race to the Moon, we get to a photo about Apollo 11′s landing on the Moon.
Like clockwork, a hand goes up: “Mr. Darrell, wasn’t that landing a hoax? They didn’t really go to the Moon then, did they?”
There are a lot of ways to know that Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. Among other things, students could talk to people alive at the time who have the slightest bit of technological savvy: With lots of other people, I tracked part of the trip with my 6-inch reflecting telescope. Ham radio operators listened in on the radio broadcasts. And so on.
But I really like this chunk of evidence: How about a photograph of the landing site?
Holy cow! You can see the tracksof Neil Armstrong’s footprints to the lip of Little West crater (see arrow below).
Tranquility Base, shot from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC), showing the traces left by Apollo 11's landing on the Moon. It really happened. Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University
The astronaut path to the TV camera is visible, and you may even be able to see the camera stand (arrow). You can identify two parts of the Early Apollo Science Experiments Package (EASEP) – the Lunar Ranging Retro Reflector (LRRR) and the Passive Seismic Experiment (PSE). Neil Armstrong’s tracks to Little West crater (33 m diameter) are also discernable (unlabeled arrow). His quick jaunt provided scientists with their first view into a lunar crater.
In a classroom discussion of “how do we know what we know” about history, another student brought up the allegations that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) faked the manned Moon landings. That makes about a dozen times this year a kid has mentioned this claim (who thinks to start counting these things?). The kid was pretty unshakable in his convictions — after all, he said, how can a flag wave in a vacuum?
I usually mention a couple of things that the fake claimers leave out — that dozens, if not hundreds, of amateur astronomers tracked the astronauts on their way to the Moon, that many people intercepted the radio transmissions from the Moon, that one mission retrieved debris from an earlier unmanned landing, etc. Younger students who lack experience in serious critical thinking have difficulty with these concepts. They also lack the historic background — the last manned Moon landing occurred when their parents were kids, perhaps. They didn’t grow up with NASA launches on television, and the whole world holding its breath to see what wonders would be found in space.
From the very first moment to the very last, the program is loaded with bad thinking, ridiculous suppositions and utterly wrong science. I was able to get a copy of the show in advance, and although I was expecting it to be bad, I was still surprised and how awful it was. I took four pages of notes. I won’t subject you to all of that here; it would take hours to write. I’ll only go over some of the major points of the show, and explain briefly why they are wrong.
Also, consider these chunks of evidence, which Phil does not mention so far as I know:
First, the first Moon landing left a mirror on the surface, off of which Earth-bound astronomers may bounce laser transmissions in order to measure exactly the distance from the Earth to the Moon. Read the rest of this entry »
@SamThiessen @Thomasjwhitmore Sam, you're capable of reading and understanding: How many humans survived the last decade with CO2 > 400 ppm?Splashed: 28 minutes ago
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Posted by Ed Darrell 
.jpg "Astronaut Eugene Cernan and the U.S. Flag -- Apollo 17 on the Moon (NASA photo)")
