Old Moon Rising

October 30, 2009

Awesome:

Apollo 17 Challenger_4x_lg

Via The Planetary Society, via NASA’s LCROSS.

More Awesome:

via Japan’s Kaguya – more HD YouTube moon horizon low-angle shots here.

(Um, so why don’t we have a bunch of low earth orbit satellites beaming down shots like this of our lovely planet? I’d pay for a dedicated cable channel with an HD feed of that.)

And then we have the Earth and our Moon. And Jupiter and its moons.  As seen from Mars.

earth, moon, jupiter as seen from mars

via the Mars Global Surveyor, via JPL and NASA.

Please review your tax dollars at work – 50 years of space exploration.

50 years of spaceflight

Via Laughing Squid, via National Geographic.

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BC Ferries, Moon, Dolores, Bernal, Sutro

September 29, 2009

The wake behind a BC Ferry:

bc ferry wake tall

bc ferry wake wide

The moon from 35,000 feet over Oregon:

moon over oregon

And here’s a blind shot that worked out rather nicely: Dolores, La Lengua, Bernal in late afternoon shadow — and Sutro peeking out from the bottom.

dolores park, bernal, sutro, la lengua

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Sutro Nights

September 23, 2009

OK, I lied, here’s another Sutro Tower post.  DAMN.

sutro-constellation

SF Citizen, via SFist.

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Bright Moon, Light Clouds

September 3, 2009

Trippy clouds last night forced me to play with both iPhoneography and long exposures on my Lumix.

Old Sears building and AAMCO – (three shots stitched together with Panorama on the iPhone):

aamco sears

iPhone of Bernal, bikes, Valencia & CC.

bikes at valencia and cesar chavez

60 second Lumix exposure of my back yard (that’s nothing but moonlight):

P1030038

60 second exposure of night sky, clouds, and the ridiculously large jade tree in my back yard:

P1030037

10x zoom on the Lumix, 1/200 shutter, 100 ISO:

P1030054

I have this cool Soviet Army spy monocular. I held it in front of the Lumix zoomed 10x.  A bitch to align, but pretty decent results:

P1030066

And I wasn’t the only one shooting last night — Mission Mission points to Drewbot’s great timelapse of the moon dancing through clouds over Guerrero.

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Good Day Moon

July 17, 2009

NASA just released pictures of the Apollo landing sites from the new Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter (LRO). Below, you can see the Apollo 14 lander, its shadow and the trails left by the astronauts.

Apollo 14

Higher resolution photos (2-3x) will be coming as the LRO’s orbit stabilizes over the next few months. Other lander photos on NASA’s website. Maybe they’ll get a shot of where Japan’s Kayuga orbiter impacted.

Also, NASA is twittering the Apollo 11 audio transcript between ground control and the spacecraft – @ap11_capcom @ap11_spacecraft @ap11_eagle. (Thanks, Laughing Squid!)

As far as low-resolution photos go, here is a tragically missed opportunity of a daytime moon setting beside Sutro Tower on Tuesday. (Sorry for the dramatic color — I had the damn exposure inadvertently sent to 1/60th and had to commit unnatural iPhoto acts to bring out our neighbor.)

moon beside sutro

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Sayonara Moon

June 19, 2009

Japan launched a satellite with an HD camera into lunar orbit two years ago.  The probe was named Kaguya, after a rather appropriate character in a thousand year old Japanese story, the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter. Last week it was purposefully crashed into the moon. Below is 3D HD footage of its last moments before impact. Worth hitting the HD button and going full screen to watch it try to skim over those last hills and crater rims.

Kaguya also got rather dramatic HD views of Earth while in orbit.

Earthrise:

Earthset:

Plus closeups of the moon’s surface:

More HD videos on the Japanese Space Agency’s YouTube page.

さよなら、かぐや 。

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Good Day Moon

February 9, 2009

Further experiments in living room astronomy.

Out my window with the Lumix, full on 10x zoom with my Oakleys in front of the lens to cut the glare. (ISO 1600 and shutter speed of 1/200th if you are for some mysterious reason interested.)

small-moon

and holding a little spy monocular up to the Lumix:

big-moon

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Space Mission

February 9, 2009

Orion from my backyard (not tonight, obviously)

orion-from-the-mission-pano2

No, not the iPhone, but rather the Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ5.  15 second exposure, rather surprised it came out this well — only slightly adjusted the white and black levels on this one.

The Lumix has a 10x optical zoom which I quite like, but it proved next to useless with my amateur astronomy efforts to capture the Pleiades:

pleiades

Oh damn you, rotating Earth!  Same for anything longer than a 15 second exposure.

Now, our neighbors down at the Lick Observatory in the hills above San Jose, THEY have some serious zoom:

moon-station

That’s the International Space Station transiting the moon.  It crossed the disk of the moon in just half a second — now there’s some good timing.

And here’s a picture of the ISS along with the Space Shuttle Atlantis in front of the Sun:

iss-atlantis-sun

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