Visiting my in-laws in Fraser CO, I was fortunate enough to witness the Moon setting over Byers Peak. To me, it looked like a big snowball descending down to the mountain’s slope.

After several months of planning, we have decided on our summer vacation destination and route. We are going to go watch the Perseid meteor shower under very, very dark skies. And in keeping with our recent roadtrips, we’ve named this one: Falling Star Trek. After all, we’re trekking out to see falling stars.

Having the dogs’ lodging arranged, the grass mowing scheduled, and the neighbors lined up to take care of the house, we will set out this weekend. Right now, our plan is to take three days to get to Moab, Utah, where we’ll spend five nights playing in the desert. From there, it’s two nights in Bluff, Utah, again to play in the desert.

And then it’s showtime.

From Bluff, we head to Monument Valley for three nights of astronomy and viewing of the Perseid meteor shower in some of the darkest skies you can find in the US. Don’t take my word for it, check out the Dark Sky Finder for the area! I can just remember seeing really dark skies from my grandparents place in Bokeelia, and I can’t wait to see those skies again.

Watch this space for more as we trek across the southern US in search of flaming rocks in the sky!

Comments around the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing abound today. As well they should. For one shining moment, mankind stood on the edge of discovery unlike anything seen in so many years. And now, forty years later, only incremental gains have been made on the brave first step President Kennedy challenged this country with in the 1960s. To me, never since have we been united in such a vision, nor poised for such a giant leap of faith as Apollo 11 and subsequent lunar missions set the stage for.

Being born just about six weeks after JFK’s assassination, I grew up around the notion of man in space. My father worked at Cape Canaveral. I can remember seeing the splashdown of the returning astronauts, and listening to the only voice there was — Walter Cronkite — describing what we were all seeing take place in front of us. It was magic… or at least seemed like it.

In school, I was taken with space travel, same as many other kids starting school in the early 1970s. We were too young to understand the horrors of the war raging on the other side of the planet, too young to see and remember Star Trek on TV during its original run, but exactly the right age to be swept up in all the wonderful images from NASA and the books in the school library promising colonies in space. I think I checked out almost every book on astronomy and space travel in our school libraries at Harrison Elementary and Brown Middle Schools, and vividly saw the artists’ concepts of where we’d be by the time I was “all grown up.”

And being the age I am, I also got to watch the first shuttle flight — that of Enterprise, and how proud I was that the first shuttle was named that! — when I was working in the library at the middle school. Through a friend of my parents, I met an astronaut — Paul Weitz, a Skylab veteran, and later member of a shuttle crew — spending a whole day with him as he toured my hometown, preaching the virtues of the then fledgling shuttle program. I watched the early shuttle missions, and really, to me, that’s when things began to change. The shuttle launches became regular, and seemingly easy, and for years, they were lost on me as I reached into my early twenties, and began to consider what I’d do with my adult life.

I was sitting at the MEPS station in Knoxville TN on that day in January when Challenger exploded, and for six grueling weeks, I endured US Air Force basic training, hungry for any scrap of information that would tell me what had happened in this tremendous disaster. And for a while, it looked like we’d recede, pulling away from space, like a child burned by a hot stove. Suddenly, space was hard, and we all got that explained to us in the sacrifice of brave souls on a winter’s day.

The seeming ease and the sudden loss in the shuttle program have, to me, sabotaged the future I expected to see through the eyes of the child I was. Sure, the space station has enabled there to be few days in the last many years when there hasn’t been mankind in space, orbiting far above us. It still excites me to go out occasionally to see the ISS cross the sky, lit by the sun in our darkened sky, but it’s not as far as we should’ve been by now.

Kennedy challenged us — yes, as a country, but also as a species — to reach the moon inside ten years. And we did it. Even to this day, the impact of that challenge is felt around us in the technological advances that make our lives easier. And now, forty years after the dream was realized, we all engage in a certain kind of pride — as a people, not as a race or country — that we were there. To my view, it was the Last Great Thing — the last big scary thing we did as a people.

It’s an odd wistfulness that I hear folks look back on it though, somewhat akin to remembering “the good ol’ days.” Unless we were sitting somewhere in space, the Apollo missions shouldn’t be viewed as something quaint and somehow old, but instead as something of pride and wonder and inspiration, and as the first step to the mankind’s future.

Here’s where the skeptic in me comes out. Until we — again as a people, a planet — can begin to speak with enough of a common frame of reference, it’s just gonna be impossible to go much farther than the moon. A single country simply can’t bankroll that kind of exploration, even if it is set about with a single-mindedness akin to our response to Kennedy’s challenge. A visionary needs to step forward, a cause needs to be found before those next steps can take place.

Think about it. We had both in Apollo: Kennedy was the visionary, and the cause was to prove our might as a country, standing up to the Soviets. While I don’t think sabre rattling exhibitions of might are the best reasons to go forth on our next steps, I do believe that a common cause is needed before folks will truly line up behind such an effort. It just seems that there are so many obstacles nowadays.

Even within our own country, we can’t speak with a common voice. We are fractured, divided, divisive, simultaneously equally materially opulent and morally bankrupt at times, and that’s likely just within any given neighborhood. Multiply by a whole big bunch, and the scope of the problem becomes clear. Our culture has become too focused on what gains can be had in the short term, angling to take the credit or calling out where the blame must lie, rather than focusing on the long view and how we can all get there.

I heard it said well the other night in a Cronkite tribute. If you’re younger than your mid-40s, you probably have no recollection of the Apollo missions, no sense for the excitement, wonder and awe at what was achieved, and how much it meant. Folks born in the early years of the shuttle program are now in their early thirties, and my daughter, soon to be making her own way in the world, likely can’t see what all the fuss was about — after all, from the view of her years, we’ve always been in space, haven’t we? Those are the folks that need to get the fever to reach beyond our fragile planet. It won’t be my generation, and it may not be hers, but the foundation’s gotta be built upon, not for us, or our children, but for our children’s children and beyond. That’s why it’s important, that’s the cause.

This little rant started out as just some thoughts on space, the future that has yet to come, and my clumsy view of some of how we got to where we are. It’s a bit of a buggy ride, I know, fraught with crazy wild-eyed ravings. But tonight, in reflection of Apollo, I’m reminded of the future I was promised as a child, and crazy present that in so few ways lives up to those visions.

I found this video from a link somewhere on Twitter. I need to find me some dark skies to play with this technique.

It’s just beautiful — enjoy!

Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party from William Castleman on Vimeo.

There’s an scenario out there called The Slashdot Effect. This is driven by the mention of some website in a story on Slashdot, and is the effect of the subsequent flood of traffic to the site mentioned in the story. Frequently, this crashes websites, and is more than a little irritating to the website owner and the network provider supplying its pipe.

Now, magnify that by a gazillion. That’s what NBC did tonight.

On the Nightly News, NBC reported on the floating tool bag accidentally lost during the shuttle mission, and mentioned that a website that shows the tracking of the bag was linked off their site. Like any good monkey, I swung from webvine to webvine. Apparently, I wasn’t alone, and found that the tracking site was cratered. No response. Not a whisper. (BTW, it appears — from the domain name — that this is an individual ham radio operator’s site.)

I can’t imagine the number of folks trying to hit that site, all at once, and probably at a substantially higher rate for days or weeks. I sure hope the webmaster has a lot of time on his hands. I suspect there will be quite a bit of webdust to sweep up after this little event!

When I was growing up, I was an avid science fiction reader, and voraciously chewed up just about anything I could get my hands on. And as part of that, we all knew about the ABC’s of science fiction: Asimov, Bradbury and Clarke. This morning, I caught the news that Arthur C. Clarke had died, leaving only Bradbury from the ABC’s.

I always enjoyed Clarke’s work, and have been reading his work since I was a kid. In my opinion, he had a better grasp of the science end of science fiction than almost any of his contemporaries. His writing went beyond just the science though; for me, he could spin quite a yarn. Just read the first part of Chapter Seven of The Songs of Distant Earth. If that description of the end of our solar system doesn’t touch you, I don’t know what will.

Happy trails, Arthur C. Clarke. Enjoy what’s next.

Tonight’s sky offered a total lunar eclipse, and I thought I’d go out and shoot it. This was the first total lunar eclipse I’d watched like this since I was a kid. I can remember sitting outside with Mom and Dad, sometime in the ’70s, watching a total lunar eclipse on a nice summer night.

Tonight was not summer-like! The temperature was 15°, with a windchill easily down near zero. It was coooold. I braved it through to totality, and enjoyed watching the show.

For shooting, I set up two cameras. I set the 20D up for a timelapse shot. I expected I would take a frame every five minutes, and then stitch ‘em all together at the end, and make this great image. Well…… I sorta shot myself in the foot on that one. Midway through the shoot, I thought I had the lens on autofocus, and changed it to what I thought was manual focus. Bad move, as I had it exactly backwards, and once the lens was on autofocus, the camera wouldn’t shoot because it could get a focus lock on the very dark sky. Bummer.

The second camera was the 40D, and I put the Celestron 750mm/f6 lens on it for shooting near-fullframe images of the moon as it descended into darkness. I’d say that the biggest majority of those images were not very good. I had this set up on my Bogen trike, but even that didn’t appear to be stable enough for this big combination of lens and camera, especially in the light wind. Essentially, I got a log of blurring. I also shot some exposures, especially during totality, that were too long, causing the moon to drift in the frame…. blurring again.

So what are the lessons? Well, the first is to set manual focus on the lens while still in the house! I’d also recommend a heavier tripod, and frankly, a motor drive would’ve been peachy. Having a drive would’ve eliminated some of the drift problems, and would’ve make the shoot much easier. I have that kind of mount on my Celestron C8, but I didn’t pull it out. That was a big mistake.

The last thing would be practice. I need to work with my equipment more for this kind of shoot, perhaps shooting the moon through its phases. That’d be a good training ground, since the shooting conditions are similar, at least up until totality. Since the next total lunar eclipse visible from North America isn’t until late 2010, I think I have some time to hone my skills!

Found here, the Planetary Society is lobbying to save the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. You can read their statement here.

To me, this is bigger than big. We, as humankind, owe it to the rest of the life on this planet to do this one thing to try to protect it from objects in space. Cats and dogs may be great pets, but they can’t track a near-Earth orbit rock. Right now, we’re the last stand in the protection of the Earth from these denizens of deep space. I’ve stood at the edge of Meteor Crater in Arizona, and the devastation caused by that impact is more than my mind can comprehend. That wasn’t even all that big a rock. Imagine the devastation if an object like that were to strike in a populated center. Now imagine it’s even larger. It’s staggering.

Follow the links on the statement page, and send your Congressional representatives a message about preserving Arecibo. Let them know that you’re interested in improving mankind’s chances of surviving longer on this planet. I did.

Although it’s not getting any media play, there’s a bright wanderer in the sky that has literally cropped up out of nowhere.

Comet Holmes (officially Comet 17P/Holmes) has been known for a while, and until a few nights ago, it was quiet, extremely faint, and of no real note. However, late last week, it jumped in magnitude from about mag 17 to about 2.5 — naked eye territory. And in fact, you can find it easily in Perseus as of this writing. Even the bright moon is not hindering it.

It’s a weird one though. My understanding is that it is on the far side of the sun from us, and since a comet’s tail grows away from the sun, we get our view of the comet as a “head on” perspective. So, no real tail as viewed from Earth, but instead, it looks a gigantic fuzzball. It’s been very cool to watch, so last night I figured I’d take my 40D and my seldom-used Celestron 750mm f/6 lens out.

It was a cold night, and that seemed to help with the shooting. It’s obvious that I didn’t have the focus quite right, but this stack of fifteen shots, each 2 seconds in length, ain’t a bad capture of what the little snowball looked like. You can clearly see the nucleus, and plenty of shiny stuff around it.

Enjoy!

So this morning Slashdot posted a blip about a Microsoftie buying his way into space. (Which, for $20M may be one of the best bargains on the planet — just not very attainable for the masses.)

Of course, there were loads of comments about this, but one really seemed to capture it for me:

Can we take up a collection to send a civilian into space with the ability to translate the experience into art? Somebody like Spider Robinson, or Tom Wolfe, perhaps? How long will the most liminal and mind-expanding human experience only be the province of those who lack the passion and subtlety to appreciate it, and who cannot, therefore, sublimate it for the rest of us? “Space. Wow. It was so damn empty. Man, you can see the whole earth! Even the dark bits, without people!” If we send somebody up who has the craft to record their experience in an engaging and creative way, then it is like sending ALL of us into space. I can think of no quicker way to give the space program the cultural boost it needs to survive increasing (understandable) voter apathy. Sure, Veruca Salt and Augustus Gloop like chocolate, but they don’t deserve the factory…

I volunteer to be that artist. Give me my iPod, my camera, a MacBook Pro, and rocket me into space on a Soyuz. I’d capture your art, and make space accessible to the common brain — darn tootin’ I would!!!!