A final pic showing the 'far side' of the tree - looking at the state of the base of the trunk, it's not hard to believe that it could be partically the orig. tree in places..who knows. This is a 2 x 2 mosaic

I don't think they're behind us, things just get reported about 7-14 days in arrears

Doug

'MSL' is fine. Pathfinder was Pathfinder, Global Surveyor was Global Surveyor, and if there had been only one MER, I wouldn't have been suprised to see it called MER.

Doug

A few more images.

First and second, labeled and unlabeled images of the house from a different view;
Me infront of 'the tree' in an attempt to formulate some magnificent leap forward in scientific thinking (I failed)
And finally, the tree again, from the 'reverse angle'
For more info
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woolsthorpe_Manor
http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-vh/...olsthorpemanor/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Isaac_Newton

Here is a little mosaic of three frames from my camera ( Canon S2 IS for those that like such info )

On the right, Woolsthorpe Manor. Take carefull note of the windows on the first floor. The 'top left' window at the front of the house is the bedroom window in which Newton was born Christmas Day 1642. He left to go to Cambridge University but returned when the plague struck Europe and the University closed. When he returned, he did his work on Optics. The top right window on the front of the house is his bedroom from that time - and the small window on the near-side wall ( the middle of the three on that wall ) is the small south facing window thru which he did his spectral work projected, using a prism, onto the far wall of the bedroom (by what I found is the door) - and that front window is the one from which he is said to have considered gravity 'on the occasion of seing a falling apple'. There's 1001 different tales of this if you go online, most not including the myth that it fell on his head, some saying he was sat in the Orchard, but 'on site' they suggest he saw it from his bedroom.

And which tree was he looking at. Well the actual tree is supposed to have been basically killed in an 1820 storm, but the tree they mark down as being either the remnants or decendant of that tree is the tall, distorted tree near the left end of the mosaic ( I took the mosaic so it would show house and tree ). The base does look very warped and broken, so perhaps there are remains of the original tree playing a part in that tree, who knows. There is a snuff box in his bedroom made from a log cut from the fallen tree in 1820 (and somewhere in the US a cutting is rumoured to have grown into a tree), along with a copy of Pricipia Mathematica and a replica of his small newtonian telescope

All in all, a great little trip out today - something of a pilgrimage for a space nut like me, for as Tom Hanks said...once the engines are off "Isaac Newton's in the driving seat"

A few more pics to follow.

Doug

Another member shows his true colours..

"Well, I'm sorry, buy I'm going to have to shoot you"
"Right'O Sir"



Doug

Well - unfortuately, I don't have a brother called Larry, nor a sister called Jennifer (google for both )- but my great grandfather did install the lightning conductors on the Liver birds on top of the Liver Building in Liverpool

Doug

Yes - just because this is called Unmanned Spaceflight, it doesnt not mean it's Anti Manned Spaceflight - and anyone caught being persistantly ranting in that tone will be asked to 'refrain' so to speak

Doug

Not every day you get to do this - I'm posting from an outhouse of Newton's birthplace - Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire. Yes - it has an apple orchard, and yes, it has his bedroom where he used a south facing window to split light into its spectrum. Sadly, you can't take pictures in the house, but I've got some nice ones from outside that I'll post when we get home in a few hours!


Doug

I've been trying to find this thing in my Binos without any luck so far - I'm such a crap observational astronomer it's not even funny, but I'll keep looking tonight

Doug

I don't know. Your post just did not sound at all funny in any way. It needed a winking smiley face or something, just to mark it as tongue in cheek. If it had been spoken, it would have been obvious, but subtle intonation vanishes in the world of the forum posts, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who saw your post and thought "woah, chill"

Doug

Bruce - he was being funny....relax

Doug

Yup - via the psa you can get to 1800andsomething

The browse JPG's are utterly perfect - they're exactly what was needed, and being able to just grab an orbits data instead of using the lengthy convoluted pain-in-the-backside PSA system is a big big BIG bonus - if you can catch up to 1863, it would be great.

Doug

I think one could make a strong case that the formal founding and funding of New Horizons was as a direct result of TPS petitioning.

Doug

JPL site says they intended to investigate a dune over the w'end

Doug

In this section, it makes sense. Someone posted it elsewhere in the 'sensible' bits of the forum and I really couldnt be bothered to move it so it got culled

Typical Onion stuff - top notch

Doug

The three naming competitions I've heard of are MER, Sojourner and the DS2 probes, and of those, the DS2 probes certainly were not children only ( I entered and I wasn't a school kid at the time ) - and I'm not sure about Sojourner.

If it gets kids interested in these things, I'm all for it. The names do not bother me one iota - and whilst for about 30 seconds I hated the names Spirit and Opportunity - now, after almost 1000 sols of surface operations, I couldnt possibly imagine them being called anything else - they typify the situation the two vehciles found themselves and I for one now love the names.

Doug

Here - http://pds.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/software_download.cfm - I think.

Doug

So am I.

The Messenger, you've had warnings and indeed a suspension because you've refused to stop posting this garbage in the past. Consider this your final warning.

Doug

Well - Contour would have gone to 73P - but it was not to be

Doug

Do you know what would be cool

Someone buys a patch of land, perhaps 50m on a side, and builds a model of Eagle crater in it

Doug

Wonder if I squeeze a paper out of it?

ANyway - meanwhile, after noting that my martian geography is so bad I couldnt tell the difference between the north and south pole, I thought I'd play with something a little less...'dynamic'...

Thats just about every Val Mar image I can find from the first 1250 orbits, I may have missed a few - but as you can see then tend to drop into 'batches' of similar observations from which I could probably generate some nice regional mosaics.

Doug

There's an equation to calculate the aparant magnitude ( i.e. those values ) from the absolute magnitude ( the mag of an object at a standard distance ) which we know for the sun.

Doug

'going to become'

It's already happened.
http://planetary.org/programs/projects/sos/

Doug

It'll be something like 22348 x 4000, to as much as 6000.

At a poster sort of resolution ( 150dpi ) you could do that at 3.7 x 0.6-1m

Doug