Spinning at 12rpm does kind of making taking pictures a bit hard - and if you do some research on the long term history of LP...it had NO money - none at all.

Doug

I THINK I got a bit cleverer in making selections - this may or may not be accurate.

FWIW - I've attempted to debayer a tiny piece of image, by hand (using a 90x1 pixel selection again and again, to select alternate rows to cut them to a new layer - then again on columns, to split it into 4 layers. Then, I figured out which were the blue ones ( the darkest ) and from that established the red and the green. I then duplicated those layers to fill out the 2x2 pattern, and then copied into channels on a new image.

Hopefully someone will figure out a better method of doing this

I heard about this 24 hours ago, and couldn't believe it - this is EXACTLY what has been missing from ESA. MASSIVE kudos to the ESOC MEX flight ops team for doing it

http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/VMC/index.html

The last time I wrote a post and hit 'submit' at UMSF with a smile this big on my face, was when Oppy successfully got out of Purgatory.

Cross your legs, put out your arms. Then they can unscrew you from the ground afterwards.

Given that ESA talked about the challenge with Smart - 1 and China mentioned it with Chang-e 1, the power problems must be fairly significant for an eclipse so I'd have thought not.

I wouldn't recommend it - for a reason I can now brilliantly demonstrate....

We've pushed back to Sunday, because the bubble of still air that we were hoping to release in to has decided to take it's time arriving. A Sat predict has changed from a nice flight about 40 miles east, to about 80 miles south. The Sunday predicts are now better than the Sat predicts ever were - with a 40km E flight to about Thetford area.

Chances are - it'll get shuffled again one way or the other, and it's hard enough organising the launch team Best bet is to follow along here : spacenear.us/tracker/ : we'll twitter, hopefully uStream, probably live-track the flight.

Doug

Forum time-warp.......

http://www.autosport.com/gallery/photo.php/id/110910

Remember me an Whaley posting on the blog That's him.

Decision made on extra 'goodness'. I'm going to play chicken. No wide angle lens, no mirror. Just the camera, as it is, pointing straight out. Better is the enemy of good enough and all that jazz.

It's 320x240x15fps movies ( 10s ) then 5 stills, looping at about 1 minute intervals.

It's out in the garden right now running a loop with trees and sky to look at for a couple of hours, inside its housing.

On the day, we'll be launching from Churchill College on the west end of Cambridge.

If we ever have a big US UMSF get-to-gether, you know he's going to arrest your trespassing arse don't you

Worth noting - it wasn't a failure of Orion's parachute system. It was a failure of one of the parachutes needed to set the drop up ready to deploy Orions parachutes in a flight analogous way.

Yeah, it's getting a bit crazy with every single thing having a twitter acount and tweeting at other tiny things...






it's here : http://spacenear.us/tracker/

The video now works MASSIVE Kudos to CHDK guru Dave Mitchell who sorted out an A560 firmware for me that works.

We hope to go this Sat - forecast looks quite good

BAUT seems dead at the moment - direct links below

Aug 13th at 0842Z
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realti...813_0842_c3.gif

0918Z with wierd smudge
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realti...813_0918_c3.gif

0942Z without
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realti...813_0942_c3.gif

Looks like some sort of optical phenomenon - who knows - cool image none the less.

I'm seing the edge of Victoria, with Opportunity heading off across the plains, people lining a 'street' either side of her tracks waving her on

I'll see you there Harri!

That's a very succesfull drive - I'll have to send some kudos to Paolo for that!

D

Hayabusa was a rendezvous and orbit, and well, a comet flyby doesn't count as an asteroid flyby, does it

Ones I can think of

Galileo did Gaspera, then Ida & Dactly (that's only one flyby though - Dactyl was just gravy )

NEAR did Maltide then EROS, then orbited Eros

Stardust did Annefrank

DS1 did Braille ( although that didn't go well )

6 proper planned ones then I think.

Technically, NH did 132524_APL, and Cassini did Masursky - but they're more of a distant encounter rather than flybys.

This debate isn't getting anywhere. We're getting longer and longer essays that actually don't say anything. And we have ALL done it, despite it being explicitly banned in the rules. I let it go for a few days - but realistically, it's not going to go anywhere - so I'm closing it.

I've been to the old rocket testing site on the Isle of Wight
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v667/mah...Rockettest1.jpg

The National Space Centre here in Leicester where Beagle 2 was operated until it's demise, and they have a Thor-Able and a Blue Streak ( I think) rocket, and one of only two complete Soyuz outside of the former Soviet Union.

Clean-rooms at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory to see C1XS, an Xray spectrometer going onboard Chandaraayaan (enough A's in there?) -1

ESOC in Darmstadt, including a brief tour of the back-offices and control rooms for XMM-Newton, Cluster, Envisat and so on by David Southwood.

Of course, the Science Museum in London is good, as is the new Greenwich Observatory, and Isaac Newton's home, Woolsthorpe Manor (including Apple trees )

But I've not 'done' Florida, Houston or California - all of which have amazing things that I must see one day.

It's not unlikely (indeed many suggest it is quite probable ) that a KBO the size of Mercury, Mars, or ever larger, will be found in the not too distant future. Would you call that a dwarf planet?

Doug

I think it's been fairly well demonstrated that 'science' is unable to sort this for itself. Two years on and we still have a nonsensical definition, a shed load of confusion, and frankly, a rather embarrassing 'debate' webcast that achieved 9/10ths of 4/5ths of exactly nothing. Some scientists made this mess, and science in general is incapable of resolving it.

This isn't a good thing.

"They can't even decide what a planet it - what's with that?"

Science does not come out of this well. Teachers are confused, students are getting mixed messages, text books are right today and wrong tomorrow. It's a bit of a farce - I wish it would just go away because ultimately it just doesn't matter. At the very best, this situation will end with headlines such as "After 5 years debate, Pluto IS a planet" or "6 Years on, Planet debate rages on" or "7 year itch, science squabble over Pluto continues" or "Planetary U-Turn, Pluto back in the pack".

Ever tried to explain why PLuto isn't a planet anymore? I'm embarrassed for science trying to explain it.

One word to sum up the entire thing

Crap

Doug

Like you wouldn't believe.